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Maritime intelligence, from AIS to the camera on the mast.

Five problems in maritime surveillance where the data is degraded, missing, or simply too large to look at. What was going wrong, and what we built for each one.

01AIS blackouts

A vessel goes dark, and tracking stops with it

The problem

AIS drops out for all sorts of reasons: equipment failure, poor reception, or a crew that would rather not be seen. The moment the signal stops, everything downstream stops with it. Nobody can say where the vessel is heading, when it will arrive, or which port it called at while it was quiet.

How we solved it

We predict from the vessel’s own history instead of its live signal. Past voyages, speed behaviour, headings, and the routes and ports that class of ship habitually uses feed one model that answers three questions at once: the most likely path from the last known position, the expected arrival time along it, and the ports it may have called at during the silence. The prediction horizon is configurable, so the same system serves a six-hour question and a six-day one.

Tracking continues through the gap instead of ending at it.

Full write-up on faisel.in
02Satellite imagery

Cloud and haze hide the ships you are looking for

The problem

Satellite passes are infrequent and expensive, and cloud, haze and rain wash out a large share of what comes back. The detector that runs afterwards inherits every one of those artefacts as a missed vessel or an invented one. The images are also enormous: high resolution across a very wide area, which most pipelines handle by cutting into tiles and losing the geography in the process.

How we solved it

Restoration and detection in a single pass. The pipeline removes haze, cloud and rain distortion first, then detects and classifies ships in the restored scene, with no round trip through a second system. It works at scene level rather than tile level, so a vessel straddling a tile boundary is still one vessel and its position on the chart is still right.

Vessels that were sitting under weather come back as detections.

Full write-up on faisel.in
03Camera feeds

How far away is that ship? Normally an expensive question

The problem

Getting range from a camera usually means calibration, a stereo rig, or knowing the exact lens and sensor. Coastal sites and vessels rarely have any of the three. They have whatever camera was already mounted, at whatever angle somebody mounted it.

How we solved it

Range from a single uncalibrated camera, in real time, using the visual cues in the scene and what the model has learned about how each class of vessel presents at distance. The same pass detects the ship, classifies it and tracks it across frames, so one video feed produces identity and range together rather than needing two pipelines behind it.

An existing camera becomes a ranging sensor, with no hardware change.

Full write-up on faisel.in
04Anomaly detection

Knowing which movements are worth looking at

The problem

Ships do not move at random. They follow lanes, corridors and port-to-port routes that repeat for years. The volume of AIS traffic is far too high to watch by hand, so the one thing worth seeing, a vessel doing something its class does not normally do, sits buried in millions of ordinary position reports.

How we solved it

We mine historical AIS to extract the routes that actually exist, clustered by vessel type and region rather than assumed from a chart. That becomes a live baseline. Incoming positions are scored against it continuously, flagging departures from known corridors, behaviour that does not match the vessel class, unusual clustering in fishing grounds, and route changes that are only beginning to emerge.

The watch list comes out short enough for a person to work through.

Full write-up on faisel.in
05Operations

Everything around the model that makes it usable

The problem

A model is a small part of a working maritime system. Somebody still has to label the data, correct what the model gets wrong, read the output without stopping what they are doing, and make sense of hours of voice chatter nobody has time to listen to.

How we solved it

Anchorage detection straight from raw AIS, annotation and correction tools built for the people who do the labelling rather than the people who wrote the model, dashboards that answer spoken questions so an operator can keep their hands and eyes elsewhere, and speaker diarization over maritime voice traffic so chatter becomes searchable text attributed to whoever said it.

The analysis reaches the people who need it, in a form they can act on.

If you are working with AIS, satellite passes, or camera feeds and the data is fighting you, the first conversation is about the problem, not the technology.

Have a problem worth solving?

Tell us what is difficult, repetitive, inefficient, or technically challenging. We will help determine what should be built.

Usually answered within one working day.

Or write to contact@lojits.com with a short description of the problem.