Surveillance in Action by Panagiotis Karampelas & Thirimachos Bourlai

Author:Panagiotis Karampelas & Thirimachos Bourlai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Keywords

Mobile applicationsSurveillanceSafetySecurity

Introduction

Orchestrating maritime surveillance operations and safety collaboration has a number of obstacles to overcome in terms of coordination using ICT and surveillance technology. Operations at sea include additional limitations than in typical continental cases. A number of typical technologies are employed to detect maritime incidents, the location, the direction, the historical positions and overall status of vessel traffic. The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is an automatic tracking system used on ships and by vessel traffic services (VTS) for identifying and locating vessels. It allows data exchange between ships and nearby AIS base stations. Data transmission is also possible through satellite AIS. AIS information supplements standard marine Radar, which continues to be one of the most important methods of collision avoidance and position detection for water transport. AIS main use is for traffic management, search-and-rescue, and banned vessel tracking. AIS information provides position coordinates of a vessel and therefore it is possible to overlay these positions on a Radar screen view in order to verify vessels detected and vessels without AIS transmission (e.g. smaller boats or banned vessels). This only shows the key importance and need for a single window data fusion system that may allow the overlaying ad hoc and systematically multiple sensors input.

The European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) operates and early warning system for significant maritime safety, rescue and security incidents in European water and other parts of the world. The key aims are to allow policy decision making on the European level and to accelerate the mobilization of European Union authorities to respond to oil pollution situations. The system also generates information to face other types of incidents.

However, AIS based tracking is far from a universal tracking solution. AIS mechanisms cannot securely—strongly identify a ship. AIS transmitters is possible to be switched off, or blocked from transmitting at vessels intending to remain unidentified and track-less that are considered a maritime security breach. Additionally, it seems possible to maliciously manipulate the AIS transmission by altering the GPS location and transmit mock positions of the ship and its route proving hard to detect with a number of possibilities for inappropriate use. Furthermore, small boats do not have the obligation at all to carry AIS mechanism. Therefore there are numerous ways that permit for unidentified vessels to move people and to transfer goods between neighboring countries and regions completely untracked. As a result, in such cases, discovery and rescue operations and identification procedures need to be conducted by sea vessels having visual contact and alternative tracking means such as radars, which however are not integrated into a single window system by design.

Thermal and optical cameras are also used to assist towards identifying position of ships and status of vessel traffic, especially at an incident location. GPS positioning is also critical for reporting the location of land and marine objects and staff. The last but not the least of tracking devices are radars that may be found established at certain key surveillance points and also portable on vehicles and ships.

Combining all

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