A.S. Prote Maritime Ltd is one of the main partners in this Research project, which is funded by the European Space Agency. Our aim is to help the environment by tackling the global problem of floating Marine Litter affecting the world’s oceans. State of the art techniques are needed for the detection and quantification of floating marine plastics. Remote sensing is one of the tools necessary for the detection of floating marine plastics because of the extensive area coverage and frequent observation. While floating plastics are reported in high concentrations in many places around the globe, no referencing dataset exists either for understanding the spectral behavior of plastics in the real environment, or for calibrating remote sensing algorithms and validating their results.
This problem is tackled by constructing large artificial targets and deploy them on the sea surface and extracting indices through UAV and satellite remote sensing, enabling the partners to:
Explore the feasibility of detecting plastics in the aquatic environment using UAV and the open access Sentinel-2 mission
Extract meaningful spectral measurements in near-real scenarios
Simulate the coarse satellite pixel using the fine UAS resolution