Visual surveillance in the maritime domain has been explored for more than a decade. Although it has produced a number of working systems and resulted in a mature technology, surveillance has been restricted to the port facilities or areas close to the coastline assuming a fixed-camera scenario. This dissertation presents several contributions in the domain of maritime surveillance. First, a no...

This paper presents a sensor system for detecting defects in ship hull surfaces. The sensor was developed to enable a robotic system to perform grit blasting operations on ship hulls. To achieve this, the proposed sensor system captures images with the help of a camera and processes them in real time using a new defect detection method based on thresholding techniques. What makes this method di...

We describe a multi-disciplinary system model for determining decision making strategies based upon the ability to perform data mining and pattern discovery utilizing open source actionable information to prepare for specific events or situations from multiple information sources. We focus on combining detection theory with game theory for classifying ships in Arctic Ocean to verify ship report...

Fault detection and isolation are very important elements in the design of faulttolerant decision support systems for ship operator guidance. This study outlines remedies that can be applied for fault diagnosis, when the ship responses are assumed to be linear in the wave excitation. A novel numerical procedure is described for the calculation of residuals using the ship’s transfer functions wh...

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery has proven to be a promising data source for the surveillance of maritime activity, and its application for automatic ship detection has been the focus of many research studies. Apart from the well-known CFAR detector, there has emerged a novel method for automatic ship detection, based on the wavelet transform. Since the underlying principles for both met...

In this paper, we present a robust and accurate water region detection technique developed for supporting ship identification. Due to the varying appearance of water body and frequent intrusion of ships, a region-based recognition is proposed. We segment the image into perceptually meaningful segments and find all water segments using a sampling-based Support Vector Machine (SVM). The algorithm...

The aim of the research presented in this paper is to find out whether automatic classification of ships from Forward Looking InfraRed (FLIR) images is feasible in maritime patrol aircraft. An image processing system has been developed for this task. It includes iterative shading correction and a top hat filter for the detection of the ship. It uses a segmentation algorithm based on the gray va...

In this article, we propose a novel detection method for underwater moving targets by detecting their extremely low frequency (ELF) emissions with inductive sensors. The ELF field source of the targets is modeled by a horizontal electric dipole at distances more than several times of the targets' length. The formulas for the fields produced in air are derived with a three-layer model (air, seaw...

Ship detection from satellite imagery is something that has great utility in various communities. Knowing where ships are and their types provides useful intelligence information. However, detecting and recognizing ships is a difficult problem. Existing techniques suffer from too many false-alarms. We describe approaches we have taken in trying to build ship detection algorithms that have reduc...

Modern spectral and harmonic analysis is based on Fourier transforms. However, these techniques are less efficient in tracking the signal dynamics for transient disturbances. Consequently, the wavelet transform has been introduced as an adaptable technique for non-stationary signal analysis. Although the application of wavelets in the area of power system engineering is still relatively new, it...