FYP PROPOSAL

Group members:
Memoona Sadaf (3071-FBAS/BSCS/F15-A)
Palwisha Amjad (3128-FBAS/BSCS/F15-A)
Supervisor:
Dr Humaira Ashraf

Dated of submission: 19th November 2018

The optical satellite in geostationary orbit (GEO) is a new generation of Earth observation

satellite which has become a hot spot of research in recent years. The GEO satellite can greatly

improve the temporal resolution and coverage and achieve continuous, nearly real-time, long-

term surveillance of an area and get more dynamic information than traditional satellites. At

present, China’s GaoFen-4 (GF-4) satellite, launched on 31 December 2015, has the highest

spatial resolution in GEO in the world. A panchromatic multispectral sensor (PMS) is on board

the GF-4 satellite, providing images at a spatial resolution (50 m) and wide coverage (500 km).

GF-4, almost like a video camera, has high responsiveness and high-revisit observation

capabilities.

The spatial resolution of 50 m seems much lower compared with the high-resolution (≤5 m)

satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), but it’s good enough to track large-size ships in near real

time from space. The image sequences of such GEO satellites can be used to obtain the

motion information about ships, which can assist the decision-making, guide high-resolution

LEO satellites for further observation and identification, and so on. In this article, we focus

on the low-resolution GEO satellites such as GF-4 to demonstrate the capability of ship

tracking for marine surveillance with the help of this type of satellites. So far, motion

detection and estimation from remote-sensing images have been studied in many published

articles (Kääb and Leprince 2014)

A single image from QuickBird, WorldView-2, etc., has been successfully used to extract

information about moving vehicles, which is based on that there is a time lag between the
acquisition times of panchromatic (Pan) and multispectral (MS) images on the same high-

resolution platform generally, making it possible to detect the motion of targets. However, there

are big spectral differences between spectrally neighbouring bands, and the capability of target

detection is different in different bands, so we cannot guarantee that the target can be detected

in all bands.

use the time-series images for ship tracking in the article. There are two ships moving in
opposite directions in five image chips of GF-4 (size: 128 × 128, revisit interval: 186 s) in the
nearinfrared
(NIR) band sequentially, and basic information about two ships is shown in the
right of this figure. In such sequential images of the low-resolution GEO satellite, a ship
generally has a few pixels and little feature information, which can be regarded as a
weak point target in the complex sea background. Compared with traditional video
sequences, the imaging interval of the GEO satellite is long, from tens of seconds to a
few minutes per frame. At the same time, due to the long distance away from the Earth,
a small attitude control error of the GEO platform will cause a large position bias
between the target corresponding to pixel point and image position.