ESTIMATING THE AMOUNT OF SHIP RECYCLING ACTIVITY USING REMOTE SENSING APPLICATION

Abstract. The Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) was launched for earth observation and there are more than 6 million scenes of archives including coastal areas during period of five years. The wealth of satellite imagery is noticeable for investigating monitoring methods such as ship detection in wide ocean area. Especially, it is useful way to estimate past behaviour from satellite imagery compared to reference data. We collected satellite imagery and analysis breaking process in major ship breaking yards between year 2009 and 2011. Comparing the number of recycling ships by satellite imagery to the world statistics is in good agreement. In this study, Remote Sensing Application has been discussed in order to assess the potential to be used for economic activities such as ship recycling in wide coastal area. It was used to evaluate the performance of ship recycling monitoring by Satellite imagery. Additionally, an approach for recognizing ships by SAR imagery regardless of weather conditions is presented.