Sensor Networks for Underwater Ecosystem Monitoring & Port Surveillance Systems

Providing a wide variety of the most up-to-date innovations in sensor technology and sensor network, our current project should achieve two major goals. The first goal covers some issues related to public safety and security, such as the coastal and port surveillance systems. While the second one will improve the capacity of public authorities to develop and implement smart environment policies by monitoring the shallow coastal water ecosystems. At this stage of our project, a surveillance platform has been already installed near the "Molene Island" which is a small but the largest island of an archipelago of many islands located off the West coast of Brittany in France. Our final objective is to add various sensors as well as to design, develop and implement new algorithms to extend the capacity of the existing platform and reach the goals of our project. This chapter describes the whole project by focusing on the variety of used sensors and it will briefly introduce the most important required theoretical approaches such as: Blind signal processing, High Order Statistics (HOS), classification algorithms and data fusion methods which will be applied to build up an original and reliable system able to perform a sustainable and long term monitoring of coastal marine ecosystems and to enhance port surveillance capability. In addition, it discusses developed techniques and concepts to deal with several problems related to our project. The new system will address the shortcomings of traditional approaches based on measuring environmental parameters, which are expensive and fail to provide adequate large-scale monitoring. More efficient monitoring will also enable improved analysis of climate change, and provide knowledge informing the civil authority's economic relationship with its coastal marine ecosystems. Some results are given and discussed.