Modelling of the seabed and changes to it is carried out by Earth Remote Sensing and plays a major role in compiling sea charts. This application is made possible through a combination of SAR and change detection technologies.
Maritime
The maritime sector comprises numerous activities such as transportation, construction, environmental protection, disaster response, tourism and leisure, all of which have one thing in common — they all take place at sea.
Several applications have been devised for the maritime sector:
Identification of oil spills is carried out using Synthetic Aperture Radar – a technology that helps to identify oil slicks and spills as soon as possible, before they can cause critical damage to the environment.
Measuring changes in ice cover plays an important role in assessing environmental conditions and the impact of global warming on the state of our planet. This can be performed using Change Detection technologies, which measure and report changes in glaciers. In addition, where the satellite images have sufficiently high time resolution, it is possible to compile iceberg maps.
Identifying pollution is about detecting large accumulations of inorganic waste in the ocean. Processing of images obtained from Earth Remote Sensing helps global conservation organizations to clear up these “offshore junkyards”, thereby improving the state of the environment as a whole. Pollution detection is performed using Change Detection and Object Classification, as well as by calculating spectral indices.
Monitoring of port operations is used for macro evaluation of the economics of a specific region or country. As most commercial freight is currently transported by water, the economic maturity of a region will depend on the number and frequency of voyages. By processing satellite and aerial photography images it is possible to calculate these parameters and convert them to a common economic maturity index for every port in the world.