Craft Prospect delivers PHANTOMS in partnership with SSTL to improve NovaSAR’s maritime data

Craft Prospect has delivered PHANTOMS, a successful 6-month project funded by UKSA Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI): Unlocking Space for Business. We worked in partnership with Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) to develop a quick and user-friendly solution for the detection of ships and handling of ‘ghost’ ships in NovaSAR’s ‘Maritime Mode’ data.

SSTL’s NovaSAR is a small S-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) mission designed for low-cost programmes and optimised for shared launch opportunities. NovaSAR’s ‘Maritime Mode’ offers an extremely wide swath (up to 400km over open ocean), providing valuable information on shipping, customs and fishing authorities for a range of maritime applications such as asset tracking, monitoring of illegal fishing, smuggling, and pollution.

A key challenge of utilising this data lies in distinguishing between ships and so-called azimuth ambiguities, which can cause ‘ghost’ ships to appear in the data – duplicates of real ships which appear in different locations. The ability to quickly identify and disregard azimuth ambiguities increases the immediate utility of the data and the operational latency of maritime applications.

The PHANTOMS application harnesses the power of AI to quickly identify ship objects in a maritime scene and distinguish real ships from ‘ghost’ ships, allowing the user to explore the original data, metadata, AIS data and processed data products with a range of filtered views.

Robert Elliot at SSTL said: “Teaming up with Craft Prospect on this UKSA-funded study has been really useful for us. They showed that harnessing the power of AI-based data processing from our SAR satellites will benefit SSTLs customers in future.”

Lydia Green, Head of Unlocking Space at UKSA, commented, “This contract with Craft Prospect is just one of the ways the UK Space Agency is kickstarting growth to position the UK as a leading space economy. Unlocking Space for Business is set up to identify and help tackle barriers facing organisations that have not traditionally used satellite data or services, or considered how space can benefit their bottom line.”

Watch the application in action here!

Acknowledgements: UKSA, SSTL, CSIRO.