Optical Vessel Detection
Provided by 
Radar detects conductivity. Optical detects contrast. That difference decides which vessels each sensor can find, and the gap matters more than it sounds: wooden fishing skiffs, fibreglass RIBs and inflatables (the hulls that dominate small-scale illegal fishing, coastal smuggling and irregular movement at sea) are weak radar targets and frequently invisible to it. To an optical sensor they are ordinary targets.
The service detects vessels and their wakes in the visible and near-infrared bands, rejecting the two things that fool a naive detector (sun glint and whitecaps) and reporting honestly on cloud, because a clouded pass is not an empty sea. One property of Sentinel-2 is worth exploiting explicitly: its spectral bands are not acquired simultaneously but with offsets of up to about 2.6 seconds, so a moving vessel sits at slightly different positions in different bands. That displacement yields speed and heading from a single image, a measurement radar needs a visible wake to make.
Resolution sets what the answer can be. At Sentinel-2’s 10 metres, free and every five days, the service finds larger vessels and wakes and measures their motion. At sub-metre, commercial imagery resolves hull shape, superstructure and deck arrangement, which is what allows a vessel to be classified (fishing, cargo, pleasure, patrol) rather than merely counted and measured.
Related Services
SAR Coherence Stack
Aligns a time series of radar acquisitions to a fraction of a pixel, the precondition for measuring anything that moves.
Land Cover Fusion
Produces a current 10-metre land cover map for any area by combining radar and optical satellites, in the class scheme\u2026
SAR Terrain Geocoding
Turns a raw Sentinel-1 acquisition into a calibrated, terrain-corrected radar image on a map grid, ready to analyse or stack.
Space Academy
A catalogue of space training services built on 60+ years of operational experience, delivered by global space experts.
Optical Co-registration
Aligns optical imagery from any sensor, date or resolution onto one common grid, so that change detection measures change and\u2026
High-Performance Computing
Runs the platform’s services over a country or a decade of archive, scaling out across many machines, onto GPUs where\u2026
Geosphere: Ground Motion
Visualises millimetre-scale ground motion from satellite interferometry, with the displacement time series of every single measurement point.
Urban Expansion Monitoring
Measures how far and how fast a settlement has grown, and how much of that growth went into hazard-exposed land.
