Commercialising a system to improve maritime safety with artificially intelligent iceberg and sea ice detection

通过减少北极圈的冰量，气候变化正在创造更多的航线。然而，由于冰山和第一年海冰的普遍存在，这些航线存在风险。尽管船上有现代雷达技术，但北方半球每年仍有大约2-3起冰山船事故（B.希尔，海洋技术研究所）。最近发生的几起事故涉及旅游游轮不得不弃船，例如MS Explorer号沉没（2007年）和MS弗拉姆号（2007年），或渔船严重受损（例如斯巴达号，2011年）。通过数百英里的旅行来避免冰山也可能是昂贵的，因此拥有最新的冰山位置地图是很重要的。除此之外，雷达上检测到的冰山的错误警报，实际上是没有/不活动的转发器的船只也是一个问题。因此，我们有动力通过卫星成像跟踪冰山来提供额外的安全措施。这项资助的愿景是进一步开发和应用我们的系统，该系统使用人工智能结合卫星成像来检测和跟踪任何云层条件下的冰山和海冰。最终目标是通过将其转化为商业产品来提高海上安全。

By lowering the quantity of ice in the Arctic Circle, climate change is creating additional shipping routes. However, these routes present risk due to the prevalence of icebergs and first-year sea ice.There are approximately 2-3 iceberg-ship incidents a year in the Northern Hemisphere, despite the modern radar technology onboard ships (B. Hill, Institute for Ocean Technology). Several relatively recent incidents have involved tourist cruises having to abandon ship e.g. MS Explorer which sank (2007), and MS Fram (2007), or severe damage to fishing vessels (e.g. Sparta, 2011). Avoiding icebergs by travelling hundreds of miles is also potentially costly and so it is important to have an up-to-date map of their locations. In addition to this, false alarms of icebergs detected on radar, which are actually ships with no/inactive transponders are also a problem. We are therefore motivated to provide an additional safety measure by tracking icebergs on satellite imaging.The vision of this grant is to further develop and apply our system which uses artificial intelligence combined with satellite imaging to detect and track icebergs and sea ice in shipping routes, in any cloud condition. The ultimate goal is to improve maritime safety by turning this into a commercial product.