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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Front. Remote Sens.
Sec. Atmospheric Remote Sensing
Volume 5 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frsen.2024.1474468
This article is part of the Research Topic Advancing Earth Observations from Small Satellites View all 3 articles

Evaluation of the Planet constellation's daily coverage for estimating the number of vessels at Daikoku Pier automobile terminals, Port of Yokohama, Japan

Provisionally accepted
Hiroki Murata Hiroki Murata *Naoto Imura Naoto Imura Katsuhiro Nishinari Katsuhiro Nishinari
  • Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The automotive industry is a key industry in Japan; however, the worker shortage has affected transportation in the ports and harbors, including that of automobile shipping.Automobiles are shipped using roll-on/roll-off (Ro-Ro) ships. When many Ro-Ro ships dock at the same time, problems related to the shortage of workers and limited storage space for automobiles are exacerbated, decreasing transportation efficiency. The spatial resolution and temporal frequency of satellite imagery have improved with Planet Labs satellite constellations making daily observations of the Earth's surface. Moreover, the field of remote sensing is seeing an increasing number of logistic applications. As such, this study aimed to evaluate the Planet constellation's daily coverage for estimating the actual usage of seaport automobile terminals by counting the number of vessels in each image. Here, we focused on Daikoku Pier automobile terminals in the Port of Yokohama, Japan, from 2018 to 2023. Images were classified by visual interpretation into three categories: data available for analysis, data not available for analysis due to cloud, and lack of data. Over the 6-year period, 37.1% of the data were classified as data available for analysis; 21.2%, data not available for analysis due to cloud; and 41.8%, lack of data. The visual inspection survey was conducted twice, with an agreement rate of 90.5% between the two surveys. The number of vessels were then counted two times from 'data available for analysis' class, and the discrepancies were corrected. This result was compared to the actual schedule information and the accuracy was 89.0%.

    Keywords: Finished vehicle, Planet Dove/SuperDove satellites, Port and harbor, Pure Car Carrier, Seaport automobile terminal, remote sensing

    Received: 01 Aug 2024; Accepted: 19 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Murata, Imura and Nishinari. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Hiroki Murata, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

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