Practical Results for Buoy - Based Automatic Maritime IR - Video Surveillance

Criminal activities at sea have been a reality for past years. In such activities, predominantly small maritime vessels are used, which are difficult to detect. Until now, border agencies observe and protect the critical maritime areas by ships, planes or helicopters. Therefore, surveillance is expensive and full coverage is difficult to obtain. To improve this situation, the European research project AMASS (Autonomous Maritime Surveillance System) investigates to use a network of unmanned surveillance platforms, equipped with different sensors. An important sensor is an uncooled thermal imager. In the AMASS project, Fraunhofer IOSB developed an image exploitation module for maritime surveillance systems, which was described in [1] and [2]. In this paper, we will present the practical experience, challenges and performance results of the buoybased system achieved under real conditions in shallow water of the Atlantic Ocean in the Melenara Bay on Gran Canaria. Despite of rough conditions, the image exploitation provided respectable results.