Maurizio Migliaccio (M’91-SM’00-F’17) is Full professor of Electromagnetics at Università di Napoli Parthenope (Italy) and was Affiliated Full Professor at NOVA Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, FL (USA). He has been teaching Microwave Remote Sensing since 1994. He was visiting scientist at Deutsche Forschungsanstalt fur Lüft und Raumfahrt (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. He was member of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) scientific committee. He was member of the ASI CosmoSkyMed second generation panel. He was e-geos AdCom member. He was Italian delegate of the ESA PB-EO board. He was Member of South Africa Expert Review Panel for Space Exploration. He serves as reviewer for the UE, Italian Research Ministry (MIUR), NCST, Kazakhstan and Hong Kong Research board. He lectured in USA, Canada, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Germany, Spain, Czech Republic, Switzerland and Italy. He was Italian delegate at UE COST SMOS Mode Action. He is listed in the Italian Top Scientists. He is an IEEE Trans. Geoscience and Remote Sensing AE, International Journal of Remote Sensing AE, and was IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering AE Special Issue on Radar for Marine and Maritime Remote Sensing, IEEE JSTARS AE of the Special Issue on CosmoSKyMed, Member of the Indian Journal of Radio & Space Physics Editorial board. His main current scientific interests cover SAR sea oil slick and man-made target monitoring, remote sensing for marine and coastal applications, remote sensing for agriculture monitoring, polarimetry, inverse problems for resolution enhancement, reverberating chambers. He published about 160 peer-reviewed journal papers on remote sensing and applied electromagnetics.

DISTINGUISHED LECTURER TOPICS: Synthetic Aperture Radar for oil spill observation Marine oil pollution monitoring is a topic of great applicative and scientific relevance. Use of remotely sensed measurements is of special interest and, in particular, the SAR because of its almost all-weather and all-day imaging capability at fine spatial resolution is the most effective tool. Conventional single-polarization SAR oil spill monitoring techniques are limited in their capability to detect oil slicks since they strongly rely on suitable thresholds, training samples, and ancillary information. Hence, an expert image analyst is due. The launch of a number of polarimetric SAR missions, along with the understanding of the peculiar physical mechanisms governing the scattering by an oil slick, led to a new paradigm (known as physical processing) that fostered a set of polarimetric algorithms particularly robust and efficient. Hence, suitable polarimetric models that exploit the departure from the slick-free sea Bragg scattering have been developed to effectively address oil slick monitoring. A set of polarimetric features extracted following such electromagnetic models have been proved to be reliable for oil slick monitoring. Polarimetric SAR observations led to a significant improvement in sea oil slick observation since they allow distinguishing oil slicks from a broad class of lookalikes in an unsupervised way.

Wind speed estimation by Synthetic Aperture Radar The oceans cover over 70% of the Earth’s surface, carrying out about 50% of global primary production and hosting the widest biodiversity on the planet. Ocean monitoring plays a key role in all World Meteorological Organization (WMO) programs. Within such a framework, sea-surface wind field is attracting growing attention from engineers and in order to boost the sustainable development by exploiting new “clean” energy sources (e.g., to plan and implement offshore wind energy farms). In this seminar the SAR, a microwave narrowband coherent imaging system, is analyzed as sensor for sea surface wind estimation. The critical analysis of three general procedures is presented along with a physical background.

Man-made targets at sea observation by polarimetric SAR Sea man-made targets usually appear as bright spots over a dark background, this is due to some concurring physical factor: the large size of the target compared to the SAR spatial resolution, the metallic nature of the target that ensures a strong electromagnetic return and a low return of the sea surface that occurs in low-to-moderate wind regimes. When some of the aforementioned physical hypothesis do not occur the detection of man-made targets becomes a much more challenging task. In the seminar a physical-driven approach is presented along with a number of examples. In this seminar the supporting role of SAR polarimetry and physical processing for man-made target at sea detection is illustrated.