Building a Practical Multi-Sensor Platform for Monitoring Vessel Activity near Marine Protected Areas: Case Studies from Urban and Remote Locations

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors of this paper present a shore-based multi-sensor platform for vessel tracking in MPA. The proposed system seems to be fully based on commercially available systems and integrates well-established external data (e.g. AIS, radar, normal cameras...). While the system looks like a very interesting commercial application of various integrated techs, it lacks any scientific/research advancement. Besides the additional tracks discovered with respect to basic AIS, I don't see any real research advancement in this paper for it to be intended as a scientific article. It looks more suited as a communication or project advancement letter. Moreover, the case study presented in the paper seems very specific, and a generalisation of the proposed commercial solution to other situations seems hard to achieve.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper concerns the detection of unauthorized vessels within marine protected areas and the estimation of the intensity of the related navigation activity. The main criticism is that this work does not resemble a research paper. It looks more like a narrative/disseminative paper, describing the operational application of a multi-sensor platform, integrating a few off-the-shelf devices, suitably assembled to support human operators in the marine monitoring task.

Several aspects are worth being pointed out:

1) marine/maritime traffic monitoring is a well studied topic, but no reference is made to existing state of the art. A few references related to maritime surveillance results obtained so far should be mentioned, for example:

Dekker D. et al., "Maritime Situation Awareness Capabilities from Satellite and Terrestrial Sensor Systems", Maritime Systems and Technology conference and exhibition, MAST Europe 2013, 4-6 June 2013, Gdansk, Poland

G. Soldi et al., "Space-Based Global Maritime Surveillance. Part I-II" in IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine, vol. 36, no. 9, 1 sept. 2021

Reggiannini, M. et al., "Remote Sensing for Maritime Prompt Monitoring", J. Mar. Sci. Eng. 2019, 7, 202.

Stasolla, M. et al., "A Comparative Study of Operational Vessel Detectors for Maritime Surveillance Using Satellite-Borne Synthetic Aperture Radar," in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 2687-2701, June 2016.

2) The developed procedures, e.g. concerning radar tracking, tack fusion and analysis, are only superficially sketched. Further technical details and a mathematical description of the implemented procedures (if any) should be provided.

3) The relative errors on daily counts in Table 1 are large. Does this mean that the system counting performance is extremely poor? Please provide comments on this.

Indeed the paper English writing is fine and the topic is presented nicely, even if superficially from the conceptual point of view.

The reviewer's opinion is that the paper deserves a rework stage, introducing additional scientific discussions, providing deeper details about the processing approaches effectively adopted and implemented. After this task is accomplished it can be resubmitted for publication in this journal.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors,

 

I am more than happy to see that protection of marine ecosystems is finally gaining momentum, thorough system intentionally designed for that purpose.

The paper you have sent is, from my point of view, quite interesting and should be published after the remarks are addressed.

 

The main issue is not scientific soundness or overall research, but quality of presentation, so I would suggest the following:

- add short and concise conclusion

- shorten the introduction by moving majority of data regarding environment into section 2 (figures should be moved as well)

- At the end of the introduction add a short paragraph highlighting major contributions of this paper

Minor remarks:

- Reduce empty spaces in the paper

- Lines 137/8: Radar range depends on multiple factors, one very important which you forget to mention is height of the antenna (that's the reason the antenna is on the mast).

- Line 136: There is no such thing as "radar zoom range". Radar resolution is independent of the range. The zoom you are talking about most like refers to zoom at the HMI software. The sentence should be: "The software automatically check zoom set in the HMI and adjusts the radar parameters in order to achieve optimal detection performances."

 

 

At the end, I believe that this paper is more suitable for JMSE than Remote Sensing, but I will leave this decision to the editors.

 

 

Best regards,

Reviewer   

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The changes performed by the authors in this new revision are pretty substantial, and I thank them for such an improvement. The paper looks much more consistent and generalised in terms of scientific research. In particular, I appreciate the effort and the improvements in adding and partially restructuring the section, the addition of the Conclusion section, and the bunch of new figures.

I think the amendments make the article now suitable for publication.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

I received the  recommendation letter and appreciated the reported modifications. From my side I confirm that the changes made fulfill my requests and suggestions and that the novel version of the paper is now suitable for publication on Remote Sensing.