Maritime Situational Awareness System
Fusing AIS transponder and multi-band radar feeds from several vendors into one real-time vessel-tracking display.
I am building a real-time situational awareness platform that fuses heterogeneous AIS transponder and multi-band radar (S/X) feeds from several equipment vendors into a single vessel-tracking display.
Why fusion is the difficult part
AIS and radar disagree with each other, and both are telling the truth.
AIS is cooperative. A vessel broadcasts its own identity and position, which means the data is rich but depends on the vessel choosing to transmit. Radar is non-cooperative. It detects what is physically present, including vessels running dark, but it cannot say who they are. One source gives identity without guaranteed presence, the other presence without identity, and they differ in update rate, accuracy and failure mode.
Reconciling the two into a single track picture is the real engineering problem. A display showing two contacts where one vessel exists is worse than showing nothing, because the operator stops watching the water and starts debugging the system.
Status
In progress. I intend to write this up properly once it is deployed, particularly the track correlation logic, which is where the interesting decisions are.