Space Based Vessel Detection - Combining Earth Observation and AIS for Maritime surveillance

Tony Bauna

Kongsberg Satellite Services, Tromsø, Norway

WORLD CLASS – through people, technology and dedication www.ksat.no

Nordic Expert Meeting on Regional Maritime Monitoring Cooperation, 25 October 2011, Haugesund

KSAT Missions Objectives

• KSAT is a service provider dedicated to satellite operation and utilzation of satellite data

Kongsberg Satellite Services, KSAT

• Established in 1967

• Kongsberg Satellite Services since 2002

• Providing services based on polar orbiting satellites

• Round the clock operations (24h/365d)

• Employees: 120

• Turnover 2010: 301 MNOK

• Export 91% in 2010

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KSAT’s Extended Polar and Mid-Latitude Network

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• Operational Maritime Monitoring Services

• Oil spill Detection

• Vessel Detection and identification

• Ice navigation

• Wind information

• Multimission Rapid Response Services

• Services in development

• Forest monitoring, Snow, Iceberg tracking…

• Involved in several GMES and national funded projects

Earth Observation Services

• Vast ocean areas

• –appr 7x mainland

• Weather; wind, darkness,

cloudcover and fog

• Increasing oil and gas activity

• Unregistred fishing (IUU)

• Increasing vessel traffic • Shipment of russian oil

• Gas and LNG

• Transport of goods and chemicals

• Ecotourism

In vulnerable arctic environment

Norway and the High North

Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR)

• Excellent tool for detection of oil slicks and vessels

• Covering large geographic areas

• Independent of daylight

• Sees through cloud and fog

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Norway – development of satellite based oil spill detection

• Norway member of ESA already in 1984

• Exploring capabilities of radar satellites

• Vast ocean areas combined with darkness demanded new surveillance technology

• Oil-spill service in use in Europe developed in Norway • In cooperation with national authorities

• Funded by development projects (ESA EO, EU/DG Res, GMES)

• Based on user requirements- success factor

• Operational oil-spill service deliveries for more than 10 years

• Evolved into the Pan-European CleanSeaNet service (EMSA)

Oil spill detection by analysis of SAR images

• Typical oil spill, black defined feature on the sea surface, a long tail

combined with ship (small white spot) at the end.

• The black colour is due to the SAR technology

and is not true colour.

• Ships marked by white circles.

Oil spill in Brazilian coastal water. Oil spill in the south of Norway.

Identification of source Combining satellite images with AIS -a powerful combination

Oil spill outside the Norwegian coast,

ships in the area. Warning with

excact position, size and confidence

level is given.

Combined with AIS, tracked back, one of the ship

lanes closely corresponds with the potensial spill.

The vessel can easily be identified, and

authorities can decide on further action.

Identification of Source

Oil spill from an oilrig detected from satellite where the image is overlaid with information

of pipelines and offshore installations to identify the most likely source (marked with

yellow in image to the right). The other bright dots are signatures of vessels

Combining satellite images with more information layers, installations and pipelines

Experienced operators is a crucial factor in the oil spill detection service. With a 20 minute time-limit the human knowledge obtained from analyzing a large number of SAR images is very valuable, and can still not be fully replaced by automatic detection and reporting.

Development of oil spill detection service in Europe

• Norway, oil spill service since 1996

• Netherlands, Oil spill service since 1998

• Denmark, Oil spill service since 2001

• Finland, oil spill service since 2002

• UK, oil spill service since 2003

• Germany, oil spill service since 2003

• Sweden, oil spill service since 2004

• Russia, Oil spill service since 2004

• Belgium, oil spill service since 2005

• Europe, EMSA oil spill service, since 2007- 24 member states

WORLD CLASS – through people, technology and dedication

© KONGSBERG

Climate change – opening new shipping lanes

September 2007

Nordvest passasjen åpen

(orange line)

Nordøst passasjen delvis

åpen (blue line).

• Growing concern

• Increasing transport

• Eco-tourism

• Search and Rescue?

• oil-spill preparedness?

Need for enhanced monitoring

Open – but not ice free

Ship routing in ice waters reduces fuel, emissions and risks

Planned route through the ice

6 hours Actual route around the ice

3 hours

Ship Routing in Ice

• Real time access to high resolution satellite data

• Saves time

• Easiest, simplest route can be identified

• Navigate around obstacles

• Saves money

• Less fuel consumed

• Less hull maintenance

• Less time in dry-dock and therefore potential increase in number of operating days per year.

• Reduce risk

AISSAT-1

Size does (not) matter - 20x20 cm

First results from AIS-sat1

Vessel Tracking with Satellite AIS

Extended AIS coverage obtained with satellites. Multiple satellites needed to reach user temporal requirement. Example is with

ExactEarth satellites

Vessel Detection and Identification

Radarsat-2 and TerraSAR-X detections integrated with data from AISSat-1 and ExactEarth

Barents Sea monitoring; Radarsat-2 and AISSAT-1

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AISSat-1

RADARSAT-2©MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (2011)

Transhipment activity

RADARSAT-2©MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (2011)

KSAT Vessel Detection Service

• Use of Satellite images for detecting vessels at sea

• Based on Norwegian technology (algorithms developed by Norwegian Defence Research Establishment)

• Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) for detection

• Optical images for recognition

• Provides information to end users in near-real-time

• Operational deliveries with requirements from 15-60 minutes

• Correlation with other vessel tracking information

• AIS, VMS, LRIT ..

RADARSAT-2 UltraFine Courtesy MDA

EO based Vessel Detection

• Snapshot in time that provides the following information on the vessels detected:

• Location (lat/lon)

• Estimation of size*

• Estimation of heading*

• Estimation of speed*

• Estimation of confidence

*may not always be possible to

estimate due to environmental factors

Satellite sensor tradeoff: Coverage vs resolution

300 km swath

50 m resolution

RADARSAT SAR data, @CSA, Processed by KSAT, 2009

50 km swath

8 m resolution 20 km swath optical

0,5 m resolution

• Oil spill pollution

• Identification of source

• Risk assessment

• Fisheries control

• Illegal fishing

• Fishing pattern

• Effort estimation

• Safety

• Maritime traffic density

• Accident risk

• Compliance with traffic separation schemes

• Security

• Border control, illegal immigration, smuggling

• Piracy

Vessel/target detection and identification - a core application for:

SAR image /Sat-AIS integration

• Detecting non-reporting vessels

Maritime Security R&D

• Presently over 60 European projects within the theme Maritime Security

• (MARSUR, CISE, EUROSUR, MARSUNO, BLUEMASSMED, etc.)

• European R&D projects like MARISS and LIMES have been (and still are) instrumental in developing the capabilities and use of Earth Observation for maritime security

• LIMES (EC) – with the follow-up DOLPHIN just started

• Developing new and improve existing detection methods

• Correlation and user interface developments

• Short demonstration and validation campaigns towards end-users

• MARISS (ESA) – is into it’s Scaling Up phase

• Improvements of service chains

• Setting up a service network of operational service providers

• Operational demonstrations to end-users based on SLAs

• Other national and international projects also contribute to the developments of the service chain

Vessel Detection – Case studies

Example Bow Asir - Satellite AIS

Satellite AIS data provided by LuxSpace/ORBCOMM

Satellite AIS data provided by LuxSpace/ORBCOMM

Satellite AIS and optical data

QB2 – 2 April 2009 07:44 UTC

Courtesy DigitalGlobe

RADARSAT-2 Fine Beam

Dual-polarisation

8 April 2009 02:23 UTC

RADARSAT-2 Data and Products © MacDONALD, DETTWILER

AND ASSOCIATES LTD., 2009 – All Rights Reserved. Received and Processed by KSAT

RADARSAT is an official mark of the Canadian Space Agency

RADARSAT-2 Fine Beam (8m) & Ultra Fine Beam (3m)

Bow Asir

RADARSAT-2 Ultra Fine Beam

Dual-polarisation

8 April 2009 15:01 UTC

RADARSAT-2 Data and Products © MacDONALD, DETTWILER

AND ASSOCIATES LTD., 2009 – All Rights Reserved. Received and Processed by KSAT

RADARSAT is an official mark of the Canadian Space Agency

PIRASAT demonstrations for EMSA

• Experience from CSN operations, COMPASS and other projects meant that KSAT was a natural choice for EMSA to coordinate PIRASAT demonstrations in the Gulf of Aden and Somalia basin

• PIRASAT-1 in early Dec. 2009 – “proof-of-concept”

• PIRASAT-2 Summer 2010 – “Validation”

PIRASAT-1 QuickBird – examples of detected vessels

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Small

Vessel

Container

Vessel

War Ship

Cargo

Vessels

Container Vessel, 340 meters long

Warship, 153 meters long

Cargo vessel, 146m

Cargo vessel, 186m

Cargo vessel, 148m

Small vessel, 18m

PIRASAT-2: RADARSAT-2 Acquisition

PIRASAT-2: RADARSAT-2 Acquisition + LRIT

PIRASAT-2: RADARSAT-2 Vessel Detection

PIRASAT-2: RADARSAT-2 Vessel Detection + SatAIS

PIRASAT-2: RADARSAT-2 Vessel Detection + SatAIS + LRIT

PIRASAT-2: RADARSAT-2 Correlation

MARISS: Barents Sea/Svalbard 24.10.2011

MARISS: Barents Sea/Svalbard 25.10.2011 04:59z

MARISS: Barents Sea/Svalbard 25.10.2011 06:40z

Thank you for your attention!

tony.bauna@ksat.no