Monitoring illegal fishing via satellite imagery and AIS Technology

Problem Statement:

Wildfire Illegal fishing in protected maritime areas and/or territorial waters is a major concern. There are high financial incentives for fishing of certain species, some of which are endangered and their populations are critical. At the same time, the chances of illegal fishing boats being caught and prosecuted are very low, thus making this very attractive. This endangers the maritime diversity and threatens maritime food chains on a global scale. Therefore, to protect the maritime eco-systems on the long term, it is important to find solutions that allow maritime authorities to respond fast and gather the legal evidence. It is especially important that such solutions can also be deployed in lesser developed countries, which are often lacking financial and organizational means. Today, a wide variety of technologies is available that potentially could support persistent & global monitoring of marine life, providing real-time alerts on illegal fishing and legal evidence. Technologies such as global satellite coverage and Automatic identification system (AIS) for short-range coastal tracking are mature today and widely available. Using these technologies allows alerting when non-identified boats enter marine protected areas (MPAs).

Task:

This assignment aims for:

•               Gathering top-level requirements for a monitoring & alerting system, coming from relevant stakeholders such as NGO’s, maritime authorities and marine conservation agencies;

•               Define a robust system that allows to use satellite imagery and AIS as ground truth to detect unauthorized ships, understanding their behaviour;

•               Analyze and assess feasibility of the system in a real-world case, correlating analytics with business requirements and needs.

Work:

10% Theory, 60% Modelling, Coding and Testing, 10% Evaluation and Validation, 20% Writing

Contact:

Andreas Kamilaris: a.kamilaris@utwente.nl