Selected Papers from the 2018 IEEE International Workshop on Metrology for the Sea

This Special Issue is devoted to recent developments in instrumentation and measurement techniques applied to the marine field. ¶The sea is the medium that has allowed people to travel from one continent to another using vessels, even today despite the use of aircraft. It has also been acting as a great reservoir and source of food for all living beings. However, for many generations, it served as a landfill for depositing conventional and nuclear wastes, especially in its deep seabeds, and we are assisting in a race to exploit minerals and resources, different from foods, encompassed in it. Its health is a great challenge for the survival of all humanity since it is one of the most important environmental components targeted by global warming. ¶ As everyone may know, measuring is a step that generates substantial knowledge about a phenomenon or an asset, which is the basis for proposing correct solutions and making proper decisions. However, measurements in the sea environment pose unique difficulties and opportunities, which is made clear from the research results presented in this Special Issue

Coastal line extraction from SAR multi-channel images

During last decades, algorithms able to retrieve the coastline exploiting radar data instead of optical one have been presented. In recent years, the tendency to achieve high resolution has also appeared. In this manuscript, a technique for coastal line retrieval from multichannel SAR images is presented. The method faces the detection problem via statistical estimation, in particular exploiting Bayesian estimation theory. The proposed technique is able to detect the sea boundary at full resolution and low error rate. Results on high resolution COSMO-SkyMed data sets acquired on the Bay of Naples are presented, showing the remarkable accuracy of the method