• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.163-168
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• 2008

Ship detection from satellite remote sensing is a crucial application for global monitoring for the purpose of protecting the marine environment and ensuring marine security. It permits to monitor sea traffic including fisheries, and to associate ships with oil discharge. An automatic ship detection approach for RADARSAT Fine Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image is described and assessed using in situ ship validation information collected during field experiments conducted on August 6, 2004. Ship detection algorithms developed here consist of five stages: calibration, land masking, prescreening, point positioning, and discrimination. The fine image was acquired of Ulsan Port, located in southeast Korea, and during the acquisition, wind speeds between 0 m/s and 0.4 m/s were reported. The detection approach is applied to anchoring ships in the anchorage area of the port and its results are compared with validation data based on Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) radar. Our analysis for anchoring ships, above 68 m in length (LOA), indicates a 100% ship detection rate for the RADARSAT single beam mode. It is shown that the ship detection performance of SAR for smaller ships like barge could be higher than the land-based radar. The proposed method is also applied to estimate the ship's dimensions of length and breadth from SAR radar cross section(RCS), but those values were comparatively higher than the actual sizes because of layover and shadow effects of SAR.