Space-Based Global Maritime Surveillance. Part II: Artificial Intelligence and Data Fusion Techniques

Maritime surveillance (MS) is of paramount importance for search and rescue operations, fishery monitoring, pollution control, law enforcement, migration monitoring, and national security policies. Since ground-based radars and automatic identification system (AIS) do not always provide a comprehensive and seamless coverage of the entire maritime domain, the use of space-based sensors is crucial to complement them. We reviewed space-based technologies for MS in the first part of this work, titled “Space-based Global Maritime Surveillance. Part I: Satellite Technologies.” However, MS systems combining multiple terrestrial and space-based sensors with additional information sources require dedicated artificial intelligence and data fusion techniques for processing raw satellite images and fusing heterogeneous information. The second part of our work focuses on some recent promising artificial intelligence and data fusion techniques for MS using space-based sensors.