Environment-Aware Multi-Sensor Fusion for Maritime Domain Awareness: A Comprehensive Review
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Environmental conditions fundamentally shape the performance, reliability, and interpretability of modern maritime sensing systems.This review synthesizes current knowledge on how wind, significant wave height, swell, atmospheric variability, and radiative properties influence Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) backscatter statistics, wake and shadow visibility, optical image contrast, and the stability of Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals.These environmental factors induce non-stationary ocean clutter, distort ship-related signatures, and generate environmentally driven AIS delays or darkening events, thereby amplifying uncertainty throughout the multi-sensor fusion process.This review discusses that existing multi-sensor fusion frameworks, including SAR-AIS integration, while operationally effective, remain structurally limited when environmental context is not explicitly incorporated.In particular, SAR, optical, AIS, and Radio Frequency (RF) sensors exhibit distinct environment-dependent failure modes under varying sea states and atmospheric conditions, which can propagate into false detections, imbalanced sensor confidence, and reduced interpretability at the fusion stage.Building on recent advances in machine learning-based detection, high-revisit SAR constellations, and environment-informed detectability modeling, we argue that future Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) systems must adopt environmental information as a central organizing principle for multi-sensor fusion rather than as a peripheral auxiliary input.This environment-aware multi-sensor fusion perspective is especially relevant for the Korean Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and broader East Asian waters, where shallow-water turbidity-driven clutter, monsoon-induced environmental variability, swell intrusions, and dense vessel traffic create particularly challenging sensing conditions.The integration of high-resolution SAR, high-revisit satellite constellations, satellite AIS, RF sensors, and MetOcean datasets enables the development of environmentconditioned surveillance frameworks tailored to such region-specific environments.Overall, this review positions environment-aware multi-sensor fusion-based MDA not as an optional enhancement but as a structural requirement for next-generation maritime surveillance, providing a roadmap for both research and operational development in dynamically evolving maritime regions.
Source: 대한원격탐사학회지
Authors: Sumin Ryu, Sanghyuck Han
Institution: Korea Aerospace Research Institute
Language: English
Subfield: Ocean Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: Korea Coast Guard
Awards: G3426614982, G377203985, G474075534
OpenAlex ID: W7118215751