A live demonstration of satellite surveillance technology is being planned for the Indo Pacific 2022 International Maritime Exposition being held May 10-12th in Sydney.
This brings together New Zealand-based Starboard Maritime Intelligence with Canadian company MDA Ltd. and Unseenlabs from France to collaborate on an operation – dubbed 18c – focusing on exposing illegal fishing for southern bluefin tuna to show how technology can help both fisheries and intelligence analysts navigate the increasingly rich and complex data available to them.
‘We know intelligence teams are excited about the possibilities of fusing data from multiple space-based sensors and using machine learning to support their work, but it can sometimes be hard to take that step into operationalising these opportunities,’ said Starboard’s business development manager Heather Deacon.
‘We want to give a behind the scenes look into how this can work and to do this operation 18c will include over seven sources of data.’
The live demonstration will cover the planning, tasking and analysis of vessel detections from both synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and radio frequency (RF) satellite data. This will be combined with automatic identification system (AIS) data and supplemented with fishing registers, vessel ownership information and environmental data.
‘Through this operation with Starboard and MDA, we want to demonstrate the power of multi-data and how merging different data sources actually improves maritime situational awareness in a fast and clear way,’ said Clément Galic, CEO and Co-founder of Unseenlabs.
‘RF data brings a new insight and we’re delighted to make this live demonstration to show the added value that it can bring to public and private actors in the maritime fields.’
MDA’s RADARSAT-2 satellite is the most capable SAR satellite for maritime surveillance in orbit today, providing C-Band radar coverage optimised for maritime surveillance. RADARSAT-2 provides 20 different imaging beam modes with many beam modes designed specifically for maritime surveillance. These maritime surveillance beam modes are able to cover hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of the open sea/ocean in a single pass.
Unseenlabs, MDA and Starboard Maritime Intelligence will all be attending the 2022 Indo Pacific Maritime Exposition in Australia. ‘We are so pleased to be able to travel outside of New Zealand again and take our product to this international audience,’ Heather Deacon said.
