Maritime Insights: Space-based data and analytics

Jeff Hurley - MDA

Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing is one the most pressing issues facing our natural world and is estimated to cost the global economy in excess of $23 billion annually or about 20%-30% of the global fish catch depending on the market. This challenge is particularly difficult to address due to the remote areas where IUU Fishing is occurring. MDA is a leader in the use of Synthetic Aperture Radar to extract analytics about vessels on the high seas far from shore to tackle the challenge of IUU Fishing. MDA will present the latest research and development work it has operationalized for extraction of vessels from SAR, vessel velocity and vessel classifications. MDA will review the analytical and machine learning approaches employed to enable these new capabilities. Further, this presentation will provide insight on how MDA investments in SAR fusion with other sources such as RF, VIIRS and optical is enabling fisheries intelligence users to address their most difficult maritime domain awareness challenges such as tracking illicit dark vessel activity.

SAR for Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA)

Patrick O'Keeffe - NATO Centre of Excellence for Operations in Confined and Shallow Waters (COE CSW)

SAR for Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA) with examples of use cases in multinational trials and exercises with NATO and non-NATO partners. SAR is one element of the digitalisation of the oceans.

Leveraging SAR for Nuclear Fuel Cycle Monitoring

Jaewoo Shin - Open Nuclear Network

SAR provides unique opportunities and challenges for monitoring nuclear fuel cycles for nuclear safeguards purposes and research on various weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programmes around the world. This presentation illustrates some of these opportunities and challenges with case studies from the DPRK context.

Machine Learning techniques using multi-sensor data for groundwater potential estimation

Giulia Tessari - sarmap SA

Chadian population is suffering of the effect of climate change due to a severe water scarcity in African arid regions. Groundwater potential maps might contribute to the hydrogeological knowledge and support the water resources management to plan the exploitation of the aquifers in Chad. A groundwater potential map based on a machine learning approach is presented for the crystalline aquifer of the eastern Chad. The spatial-distributed explanatory variables are derived from multi-sensor data: multitemporal Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 optical data, Sentinel 1 SAR data, Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) TAMSAT and GLO-30 Digital Elevation Model are used to generate seasonal and static products. Geological and hydrogeological fieldwork and knowledge-based information completed the analysis. A sample of 488 wells and boreholes are used to train and test the machine learning classifiers to define the presence of groundwater. Analysis on the performance of the supervised classification algorithms shows that Random Forest provides the higher test score, the analysis on the most relevant explanatory variables shows that fracture density, slope, SAR coherence (interferometric correlation), topographic wetness index, basement depth, and distance to ephemeral channels have the higher probability to predict the groundwater occurrence. The results allowed to identify the wadis and piedmont region in Chad as the most favourable area for groundwater exploitation.

Comparison of SAR sensors in emergency applications in the context of La Palma eruption (2021)

Miguel Castro - IABG

The volcanic eruption on the island of La Palma (Canary Islands) started on 19.09.2021, specifically as a flank eruption at the Cumbre Vieja volcanic ridge comprising the southern half of the island. On 13.12.2021, volcanic activity stopped and was finally declared to have ended by 25.12.2021. With a duration of 85 days, it has been the longest known eruption on La Palma and the first on the island since the eruption of Teneguía in 1971. The eruption caused the evacuation of around 7,000 people and the lava flow covered an area of about 3.5 km in its widest point and 6.2 km long, affecting over 1,200 hectares. It reached the sea in two different locations forming two new peninsulas. During the eruption, approximately 3,000 buildings and 70 km of transportation infrastructure were destroyed. Towns such as Todoque or Los Campitos were significantly affected, as well as agricultural land, destroying 370ha of planted areas and affecting immensely the economic situation of local farmers.

In this talk, an overview of the emergency and main outcomes derived from the processing of SAR data will be presented. The results were produced by IABG in the context of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service in support of the Spanish authorities.

When polarimetry meets very high frequencies: COSMO Second Generation

Filippo Britti - e-GEOS

The COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation [CSG] is at the forefront of radar technologies and ensures improvements and guarantee continuity with the first generation satellites, preserving the high quality and the highest precision features, both required for the interferometric activities. The programme is funded by Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI), the Italian Ministry of Defence and the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Scientific Research. Thales Alenia Space is the prime contractor responsible for the construction of two satellites, while Telespazio provides the ground segment and offers integrated logistics for operations. The present work focusses on the enhanced performances of second generation radar data and their new application potentials. In details, it will be showed how the polarimetric capabilities of the new generation radar sensors, added to the high frequency revisit of the constellation, enhance Earth Observation performances of the COSMO mission. e-GEOS, world-wide exclusive distributor of COSMO-SkyMed and operator, on behalf of ASI, of the IC-UGS (Italian Civilian User Ground Segment) at the Matera Space Center, is one of the most important satellite data providers on the market, providing also several Earth Observation based services. Mainly focusing on providing and using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images, e-GEOS is one of the major actors in the field of Emergency Services, Interferometric Analysis, Defense and Intelligence analysis, and many other services that have been developed during the years and that take advantage of the new missions available on the market.

Benefits of Very High Resolution X-band data for INSAR purposes

Daniel Carrasco - HISDESAT

ONDA is the EU funded DIAS (Data and Information Access Service) led by Serco Italia that brings together data and information close to processing facilities in a cloud-based environment. The platform provides a new way to process massive amount of data from different sources and to apply analytics that lead to the development of tailored EO value added products.

The whole archive of Sentinel-1 products as well as ENVISAT ASAR are available. Complemented by optical datasets, ONDA gives free access to multi petabyte of data worldwide. VHR SAR and optical data are also commercially available to offer a larger range of spatial and spectral resolution. Today the platform has more than 1000 registered users and is close to support more than 100 applications, from Research and Development to commercial services. CNR IREA is one of these users.

The application presented by CNR IREA studies the temporal evolution of ground deformation over large portion of the Earth surface. DInSAR analysis is performed at continental scale to monitor surface deformation and estimate the corresponding deformation velocity. 72000 S1 products (IWS) for an area of more than 4.5 million sqkm are analysed, demonstrating the suitability of ONDA for big data application.

Improving SAR satellite capability with AI/ML, information extraction from SAR “Data" not only from amplitude image

Naruo Kanemoto - Space Shift, Inc.

Space shift is a Japanese company based in Tokyo develops SAR satellite data analytic software with AI/ML. Analysis of SAR data should not be limited to its amplitude images as it contains more information such as phase changes in lower products like SLC. We developed our own AI/ML method to utilize hidden features to improve its prediction accuracy to fit market requirements. In this presentation we will introduce our methodology to utilize all of available “Data” contained inside of SAR satellite signals to improve its capability for many type of civil applications and actual cases of our various customers.

Operationalise SAR data collection and processing at scale

Thaïs Bendixen - UP42

SAR data is fragmented and spread across multiple provider platforms, which makes It hard to build and distribute algorithms, especially when you want to do this at scale. UP42 provides access to several SAR data providers, including Capella Space, TerraSAR-X and Sentinel-1. We also provide a workflow engine and scalable infrastructure, which means we enable you to bring your own algorithms to the platform, to process SAR data in our platform. You can build processing pipelines and use already existing SAR-processing algorithms, such as ship detection and ground displacement. In this presentation we want to demonstrate some examples of SAR data processing at scale.