DEEPBLUE Overview

 

DEEPBLUE™ is the stand alone version of NEXTIMAGE™ specifically targeted at coastal and maritime surveillance and fisheries, extending NEXTIMAGE™ capabilities with plug-ins developed for maritime operation management.

 

DEEPBLUE™ provides a complete workflow from the optimisation of the complex planning of satellite acquisitions to the visualisation of a ship detection report in a 3-D user-friendly environment, along with analysis reporting and live feeds from other assets.

 

DEEPBLUE™ is composed of three modules:

 

	Satellite Coverage Analysis Tool
	Ship Detection Tool
	Statistics and Decision Assisting Tool

 

Satellite Coverage Analysis Tool

 

With an increasing number of satellites and shorter revisit times the task of selecting the most suitable satellite observations for a given area in a given time frame is becoming increasingly complex.

To Address this need, Apogee has developed is proprietary satellite coverage analysis tool.

Satellite orbit modelling allows the operator to determine when data is likely to be available, for SAR as well as optical satellites.

 

A comparison to simultaneously available weather forecast allows the assessment of the feasibility of optical data acquisition.

 

Through a detailed but easy to understand user interface, the operator can select a satellite or combination of satellites for coverage analysis. It is also possible to set up viewing angles for optical satellites like EROS-A and -B.

 

 

Some of the most common remote-sensing satellites have been modelled and new satellites can easily be modeled into this once they are launched.

 

This tool is also able to automatically optimise passes for SAR satellites (e.g. TerraSAR-X and Radarsat-1), according to time, coverage or satellite.

 

Ship Detection and Maritime Feature Extration Tool

 

For over a decade, researchers have explored the possibilities of applying space-based imaging for ship detection and maritime traffic surveillance. Several systems for SAR ship detection are now operational and most of the algorithms are published in the relevant literature.

 

After evaluating existing commercial off the shelf (COTS) ship detection software we found these did not satisfy our requirements. Based on this evaluation, we developed our own automatic ship detection algorithms.

 

This module is based on both current research and new algorithms to take advantage of upcoming SAR sensor characteristics, such as improved resolution and polarimetric data (TerraSAR-X and Radarsat-2).

 

 

Target Analysis tool and Visualisation

 

 

Through this plug-in, the ship detection report is viewed in DEEPBLUE™ in a 3-D environment that provides a decision support system through the integration of ancillary information with contextual view.

 

With all detected target information stored in a database, the tool can display data detected according to a set of user-defined filters.

 

 

For more information, contact us.