A preliminary study on an optical system for nautical and maritime traffic monitoring

The nautical traffic is very difficult to monitor since many vessels are not cooperative. VTSs (Vessel Traffic Systems) use several sources of information for estimating ships' Position Navigation and Velocity, such as AIS (Automatic Identification System) and RADAR (RAdio Detection And Ranging); nevertheless, VTS areas do not cover the entire costal area of a country. In many cases the classification and identification of small non-AIS vessels could provide an important to the safety of navigation.Indeed, especially during the summer, the nautical tourism has a great impact on the maritime traffic congestion. The issue involves many institutions such as Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and local maritime authorities which are not able to monitor the high volume of nautical traffic. This work introduces an optical system designed to monitor the traffic in small coastal areas based on images acquired by a single camera. The reliability and accuracy of the system is conditioned by the size of the pixel on the sea surface (Ground Sample Distance-GSD) and by the camera footprint area as well. More in detail, this work focuses on the detection of the best camera placement on the coast for optimizing the GSD size and obtaining the shape of camera footprint. The inspection was conducted on a target area of the MPA 'Punta Campanella' located on the Sorrento coast.