Player: an open source tool to simulate complex maritime environments to evaluate data fusion performance

Abstract

In this paper it is presented a new open source tool for evaluating data fusion systems, mainly related to the maritime surveillance domain. This tool provides specific utilities for designing and simulating synthetic maritime environments to assists in the fusion development process, like designing vessels trajectories, placing different types of sensors, simulating vessels dynamics, or simulating sensors detections. This synthetic information can be used to feed a data fusion system to evaluate its response in a reproducible way under different conditions. This tool can be used to optimize the data fusion evaluation process, since testing a fusion system is a quite complex task, as the fusion output depends on the combination of multiple algorithms, configurations, measures, timing, and so on. Then, having reproducible synthetic environments can be quite useful when evaluating fusion results, system performance in dense scenarios, vessel trajectories with different dynamics, sensor coverages, and so on. This tool has been used with success for evaluating different fusion systems, and now it is presented as an open source tool, so it can be easily adapted to different environments, be used by other researchers, or extended by the community. This paper presents how it is built, the underlying algorithms, and presents some example use cases.