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Ocean Scan is the first inclusive labeled global marine plastic database, designed to benefit remote sensing researchers. Ocean Scan brings together global in-situ observations and their matching Earth Observation data in one place, and offers additional features specifically designed to benefit remote sensing researchers.

There is an urgent need to assess the levels of plastic pollution in the ocean, to allow for future monitoring and determine the efficacy of any remediation put into force. As a consequence, parallel to in situ observations, there is a growing interest in detecting marine debris using remote sensing satellite and UAV imagery. The Marine Remote Sensing Group (MRSG) at the University of the Aegean is one of the few groups worldwide with in-deep experience in developing artificial plastic debris target structures, in different configurations and polymer composition.

The project “Novel estimation of shallow water bathymetry using ICESat-2 laser altimetry, signal processing and machine learning and Sentinel-2 optical data in a highly automated approach” was funded under the European Space Agencies’ Open Space Innovation Platform (OSIP). The overall objective was to build a self-calibrating and efficient bathymetry mapping system by leveraging accurate and consistent ICESat-2 laser altimeter data as a calibration source for high-resolution Copernicus Sentinel-2 based water depth retrievals.

“Remote Sensing for Marine Litter - RESMALI” has identified the ideal parameters to study marine litter (ML) from space, including spectral bands with affordable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at top-of-atmosphere (TOA) level, in a range of wavelengths from visible to SWIR. To continue this path towards a dedicated mission, performance assessment against simulated real-case scenarios of ML is key. We want to build a simulator to estimate ML signal at TOA from a set of scenarios representing the various applications already targeted by the community (e.g.