SAR-and-AIS fusion for a fisheries enforcement agency
A national maritime agency (anonymized)
Illustrative case study. Client identity is anonymized and figures represent the class of outcome MarineAware targets, not a specific contracted result.
Challenge
The agency had a vast EEZ, a handful of analysts, and a mandate to counter illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing — where up to three-quarters of vessels never appear in public AIS. Raw satellite tasking produced more detections than the team could triage.
Approach
We fused cooperative AIS with non-cooperative Sentinel-1 SAR: CFAR and CNN ship detectors on wide-area radar, detection-to-AIS association, and gap reasoning so any radar hit without a matching transponder became a candidate dark vessel. Loitering, rendezvous and pattern-of-life scoring ranked leads, and an analyst-in-the-loop copilot explained each one with the evidence behind it.
Outcome
The team moved from drowning in detections to working a short, ranked, explainable lead list — with a clear tip-and-cue path from free wide-area SAR to high-resolution commercial tasking only where it mattered.
This engagement is representative of MarineAware’s maritime-domain-awareness work. Figures are illustrative of the class of outcome we target and are anonymized to protect client and operational confidentiality.
The blind ocean
The canonical result — from a 2024 Nature study of two petabytes of Sentinel imagery — is that roughly 75% of industrial fishing vessels and a quarter of transport and energy vessel activity are absent from public AIS tracking. For an enforcement agency, that is not a statistic; it is the majority of the problem, invisible by design.
Fusion turns imagery into leads
Radar sees hulls in any weather, day or night, whether or not a transponder is on. The intelligence is in the association: a SAR detection that matches an AIS track is a cooperative vessel; one that does not is a lead. Wrapping that in pattern-of-life scoring and an explainable copilot is what lets a small team cover a large sea.