Ship Monitoring around the Ieodo Ocean Research Station Using FMCW Radar and AIS: November 23-30, 2013

Abstract

The Ieodo Ocean Research Station (IORS) lies between the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) boundaries of Korea, Japan, and China. The geographical positioning of the IORS makes it ideal for monitoring ships in the area. In this study, we introduce ship monitoring results by Automatic Identification System (AIS) and the Broadband 3GTM radar, which has been developed for use in small ships using the Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) technique. AIS and FMCW radar data were collected at IORS from November 23th to 30th, 2013. The acquired FMCW radar data was converted to 2-D binary image format over pre-processing, including the internal and external noise filtering. The ship positions detected by FMCW radar images were passed into a tracking algorithm. We then compared the detection and tracking results from FMCW radar with AIS information and found that they were relatively well matched. Tracking performance is especially good when ships are across from each other. The results also show good monitoring capability for small fishing ships, even those not equipped with AIS or with a dysfunctional AIS.