The rapid growth of maritime transportation and its regularization have imposed an increasing demand for developing a global maritime surveillance capacity. The existing cooperative maritime traffic monitoring relies on the shipborne automatic identification system (AIS), which is now confronting severe security threats due to the vulnerabilities of AIS at both the implementation and protocol levesl. In this article, the possibility of passive AIS signal localization using low Earth orbit satellite constellations is investigated, which provides a more reliable vessel position determination. To this end, the article first presents an overview on two categories of passive localization methods. Realizations of these methods on the satellite-based AIS emitter position determination are then demonstrated and compared. To evaluate the system performance, the lower bound for the localization error is also derived. Focusing on the system realization, some general design considerations and localization accuracy optimization are further discussed.

中文翻译：

---

基于低地球轨道卫星星座的被动海上监视

海上运输的快速增长及其正规化对发展全球海上监视能力提出了越来越高的要求。现有的合作海上交通监控依赖船载自动识别系统（AIS），由于AIS在实施和协议层面上都存在漏洞，因此目前正面临严重的安全威胁。在本文中，研究了使用低地球轨道卫星星座进行无源AIS信号定位的可能性，这提供了更可靠的船只位置确定。为此，本文首先对两类被动定位方法进行了概述。然后演示并比较了这些方法在基于卫星的AIS发射器位置确定中的实现。要评估系统性能，还导出了定位误差的下限。针对系统实现，进一步讨论了一些一般设计注意事项和定位精度优化。