Abstract
The use of airborne Mid-Wave InfraRed (MWIR) imagery for maritime applications such as ship detection is evaluated for future spaceborne missions. A flight campaign was carried out on 30 October 2020 over the Solent (UK) to provide a dataset of airborne MWIR that was acquired at the same time as a spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) product. The thermal infrared imagery is compared to SAR to determine its suitability for ship detection. Automatic Identification System (AIS) data was also acquired and used to both identify and validate the ship detections where available. The results indicate that high spatial resolution satellite thermal infrared imagery can be a useful data source for ship detection.