Local technology company, Xerra Earth Observation Institute, has been awarded Australian funding to “to detect anomalies in maritime vessel behaviour at sea”. 

A media statement to The Central App says Xerra was one of three applicants for the funding, which will go towards using various data to analyse vessel behaviour at sea. 

In particular, it will help search and identify evidence of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, human rights abuses, and other related activities. 

“We are excited to announce a new partnership between Xerra and Australia’s FrontierSI, with $100K AUD awarded to our team to help the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation’s Analytics Lab Program (AGO Labs) build new industry capability in the areas of machine learning and analytics. 

“Xerra is one of three successful applicants in the AGO Lab funding.” 

Last year, Xerra was awarded New Zealand government funding to track maritime vessels arriving to New Zealand to help assess their COVID-19 risk. 

“As you know, our work focuses on remote sensing and data analytics, which in the past year has culminated in our flagship product—Starboard Maritime Intelligence, a platform that uses satellite data and machine learning technologies to monitor maritime activity.” 

It is just the latest project to put Central Otago on the way to being recognised as a burgeoning ‘tech hub’. 

Xerra and AGO analysts will work together to develop a model to detect anomalies in maritime vessel behaviour at sea, in particular identifying vessels whose behaviour (e.g. speed, location, track shape) deviates from the normal activity for vessels of its type. 

This work will enable AGO analysts to focus their attention on vessels that are anomalous or behaving in out-of-the-ordinary ways.

“This work will be a continuation of our research and algorithm development for the Starboard platform—using vessel transponder data (AIS) and satellite data to analyse vessel behaviour at sea, searching for evidence of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, human rights abuses, and other related activities,” the statement says. 

“We’re excited to be working in collaboration with AGO, FrontierSI (funding coordinators) and their analysts to better understand the questions they ask when looking at maritime vessel behaviour—what is ‘normal’ behaviour, and what signifies a deviation from that,” says Joseph Corbett, Data Scientist at Xerra and project lead for this work.

“AIS offers a significant potential for gaining maritime domain awareness, but large data volumes and data quality issues prohibit effective manual analysis at scale. 

“Our objective is to develop an automated anomaly detection model based on recurrent neural networks—a machine learning technique commonly used to model sequences of data—to learn the behaviours of different vessel types, and ultimately enable us to detect when a behaviour deviates from ‘normal’.”

The highlighting of anomalous activity could offer a step change for AGO analysts. 

FrontierSI Chief Executive Officer Graeme Kernich has said "the Program outcomes will improve the way in which AGO and the Department of Defence work with companies like Xerra, to test new innovations and applications and develop solutions, all with the objective of strengthening partnerships to build geospatial intelligence capability.’’