Special Issue "Ocean Big Data Application - Engineering"

Ocean observation represents a crucial task for human communities. Above sea level, this entails the implementation of maritime surveillance platforms, typically addressing security and safety issues (vessel traffic monitoring, search and rescue) as well as environmental sustainability aspects (fishery, pollution). On the other hand, the submerged ocean environment poses equally hard challenges for what concerns oil and gas exploitation or biology and cultural heritage safeguard. Performing the mentioned activities operationally requires the collection of a huge amount of multi-source and multi-sensor data, typically including optical images, videos, sonograms, radar/synthetic aperture radar maps, hydrocarbon concentration measurements, and so on. Publications in this Special Issue will aim at composing a comprehensive overview of the several aspects that emerge in the implementation of ocean observation platforms through big data processing. With these issues in mind, among the various subjects the authors are invited to discuss theoretical issues in big data processing for ocean observation, as well as methods for big data processing through high performance computing (such as cloud computing infrastructures, big data fusion, etc.), not excluding application case studies exploiting big data issues. To this purpose, authors are invited to submit contributions that take into considerations the following topics: Ocean data representation, analysis and learning; Deep learning applied to big data for ocean observation; Techniques for data processing applied to ocean observation and cultural heritage safeguard; Target detection, classification and identification in ocean data; Vessel traffic monitoring; Marine pollution monitoring along with sea environment monitoring issues. Dr. Gabriele Pieri Dr. Marco Reggiannini Guest Editors