Infamous "ghost ships" may not be able to hide on the high seas much longer thanks to new technology being developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The system uses a dynamic satellite camera and advanced data processing to visually track ships in real time.

If you've been following maritime news over the past few months – and who hasn't? – you may have heard about ghost ships, or dark ships, being used by countries including Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Syria to evade international sanctions. These tankers and freighters attempt to avoid detection through a variety of methods, ranging from repeatedly reflagging vessels under different national registries to physically disguising them like something out of Master and Commander.

However, one of the simplest ways for a ghost ship to vanish like, well, a ghost, is simply to head far out to sea and switch off its transponder – or manipulate it to broadcast false coordinates.

The fact is that, contrary to popular belief, tracking ships at sea that don't want to be tracked is extremely difficult. A vessel can effectively disappear just as easily today as it could in the days of Sir Francis Drake.

If you look at an online ship-tracking website, that may sound absurd because the map is usually covered with vessel icons like cakes at a picnic set too close to an anthill. But that’s only because passenger ships and commercial vessels above a certain tonnage operating on international routes are legally required to carry satellite transponders that continuously broadcast their identity and location.

Turning off or tampering with these devices can lead to hefty fines, furious insurance companies, government inspections, and even impoundment. And if the vessel in question is a ghost ship concealing its true nationality, naval forces have the right to board it and start asking some very awkward questions.

So why can't satellites simply track these ships visually? In theory, they can. In practice, the oceans are enormous, and such tracking would require capturing an immense number of high-resolution images and processing them to locate what amounts to a nautical needle in a very wet haystack. If authorities already have a rough idea of a ship’s location, visual tracking is possible, but it's a slow and resource-intensive process. Even then, it only reveals where the ship was, not necessarily where it is now.

What Mitsubishi, in partnership with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the University of Tokyo, has done is conduct an in-orbit operational demonstration of Artificial Intelligence Retraining In Space (AIRIS) aboard the RAISE-4 small demonstration satellite. AIRIS combines a radiation-hardened data processor developed by Mitsubishi, an Earth Observation Camera created by the Tokyo University of Science that performs part of the onboard data processing, and the SOISOC4 microprocessor jointly developed by Mitsubishi and JAXA.

The system boasts a number of innovations, but the most significant in terms of ghost-ship tracking is its ability to distinguish small, high-contrast targets against the constantly shifting background of the ocean surface in real time.

That’s no small task. Ocean surfaces are highly chaotic, and isolating a vessel in all that mess requires enormous amounts of data processing. The challenge becomes even greater once the limitations of satellite data transmission are factored in.

What AIRIS does is enable "edge computing" in space. Rather than transmitting entire high-resolution images back to Earth, the system identifies objects of interest through edge detection and sends only the relevant data – including coordinates and cropped image snippets of ships – back to the ground. This preselection process dramatically speeds things up, reducing what once took hours to something approaching real-time identification of maritime targets. Another major advantage is the system’s ability to retrain itself on the fly, refining what it looks for and improving target recognition as conditions change. In simple terms, the system can identify and track ships in near real time.

The upshot is that ghost ships are going to have a much harder time staying hidden in the future.

Source: Mitsubishi