Aegir installation and user manual

There have been many civilian Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites in orbit. The Norwegian Defence and the Norwegian Coast Guard have used the Canadian SAR satellites RADARSAT-1 and RADARSAT-2 operatively for fisheries surveillance in the Northern areas since 1998. Around 1900 SAR images are ordered and analysed by the Norwegian Defence each year. To ease the task of monitoring Norway’s vast economic and fisheries protection zones in the North, it is helpful to have an automatic ship detection tool. Aegir is a SAR ship detection tool developed at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI). Aegir ingests and loads data on screen and analyses each polarisation channel separately. Aegir can also combine polarisation channels for better ship-to-sea contrast to be able to detect more ships, and the ship detection algorithm can be run on the fused polarisation channel. There are two versions of Aegir. The first version is fully automatic. A status window is presented and the user also gets to see a SAR image where the land mask and the ship detections are added. In the end the program produces ship detection reports. The second version gives the possibility for the user to actively manage how the program will run and it also has the possibility for the user to make a manual mask, for example over sea ice. This user manual explains how Aegir can be installed, set up and used.