A Comparison of AIS, X-Band Marine Radar Systems and Camera Surveillance Systems in the Collection of Tracking Data

Maritime traffic has increased in recent years, especially in terms of seaborne trade. To ensure safety, security, and protection of the marine environment, several systems have been deployed. To overcome some of their inconveniences, the collected data is typically fused. The fused data is used for various purposes, one of our interest is target tracking. The most relevant systems in that context are AIS and X-band marine radar. Many works consider that visual data provided by camera surveillance systems enable additional advantages. Therefore, many tracking algorithms using visual data (images) have been developed. Yet, there is little emphasis on the reasons making the integration of camera systems important. Thus, our main aim in this paper is to analyze the aforementioned surveillance systems for target tracking and conclude some of the maritime security improvements resulted from the integration of cameras to the overall maritime surveillance system.