Saturday, March 12, 2005

Harbor Shield

Hart's E&P Net: March 2004 Issue.
A new concept called Harbor Shield is founded on an ability to uniquely identify the under water profile (underprint) of a vessel, which is captured using a bi-static synthetic-aperture sonar system located in a waterway.


Harbor Shield comprises a collection of independent systems networked together to:

-counter a terrorist threat to marine infrastructure and the merchant marine fleet,

-improve the security of all seaborne vessels and the harbors they call upon, and

-accomplish these goals without impeding the flow of marine traffic or requiring vessels to add expensive equipment.

The Harbor Shield strategic plan includes deploying automatic merchant-ship identification systems in harbor entrances and critical waterways and networking these identification systems with an easily accessible common database. The automatic identification systems will recognize vessels by comparing the underhull image of a vessel, its underprint, with a collection of vessel underprints stored in a common database. Operating like an automated fingerprint identification system, the Harbor Shield vessel identification systems will function by creating a detailed three-dimensional image of a passing vessel’s underhull using an array of bi-static synthetic-aperture sonar systems permanently located on the ocean floor of a waterway.


I wonder what happened to this idea?

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