Euronaval 2018: Airbus Ocean Finder makes the sea more visible.

At Euronaval 2018, Airbus Defence and Space has launched Ocean Finder, a self-ordering service delivering fast satellite-based detection and identification reports for assets at sea.

(Credit: Airbus Defence and Space)

Ocean Finder supports a wide range of applications, such as monitoring fleets of ships, locating hijacked boats, illegal activities detection, maritime mission preparation as well as ensuring safety in hostile areas and supporting search and rescue operations.

Ocean Finder leverages the Airbus satellite constellations, offering a full spectrum of Earth-imaging data, spanning multiple resolutions and spectral wavelengths, along with in-house maritime expertise.

This service provides information reports of ocean assets over surfaces and places defined by the user, as a single image or on a regular basis. The basic level of information provided is a ship detection report which can be optionally enriched with ship classification and identification or activity detection.

The service combines freshly acquired imagery with additional information sources including AIS (Automatic Identification System) and open source data to deliver object-centric (ships, icebergs, oil slick) or area-centric (objects in a given area) detection and identification.

The service is accessed via a dedicated web portal allowing users to easily define the localisation and the surface of their area of interest and task the satellites directly. This can be activated in standard mode to support planned mission preparation, or emergency mode to support urgent intervention.

With Ocean Finder, Airbus offers a reliable service capability with use of radar and optical sensors: the SPOT 6/7 for daily collection of areas as big as 100,000km² with an ideal resolution to identify larger ships and detect/classify small to medium sized vessels and the TerraSAR-X for near-real-time detection of small to large vessels, whatever the cloud cover and the lighting condition, automated detection capability allows for rapid delivery.