Distributed Data Fusion and Maritime Domain Awareness for Harbor Protection

Protecting a harbor against intentional and accidental threats is extremely difficult. Harbors are not closed systems. Rather, they are focal points for the movement of people and cargo, both in land and on water. As such, threats can arise from many sources that range from the smuggling of illegal and dangerous goods to the placement of mines to damage or destroy shipping. To detect the many different types of threats, a harbor must be monitored by multiple sensing systems with different sensing modalities. To be practical, such a large sensing system must be cost effective to install, can be readily upgraded, and should be robust to sensor and communication failures. In this chapter we discuss the role that distributed data fusion can play in harbor protection. We define and discuss distributed data fusion algorithms and illustrate how they could be used in port surveillance and Maritime Domain Awareness applications.