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You could track container ships, in fact they're probably so easy to detect you could run a small computer vision model on the satellite and only transmit those
by shpx 7y ago
You could track container ships, in fact they're probably so easy to detect you could run a small computer vision model on the satellite and only transmit those photos.
Obviously the most interesting container ships are the ones that you can see from space but don't show up on marine trackers. Although I don't know how you turn that information into money.
Actually someone must already be doing this, Airbus sponsored a Kaggle competition for detecting ships in satellite imagery https://www.kaggle.com/c/airbus-ship-detection https://www.kaggle.com/c/airbus-ship-detection and maybe that's how they caught that Iranian oil tanker last month.
- Rebelgecko 7y agoPlanet & others are listening to AIS transponder signals from space which I imagine takes out a lot of the need for a bandwidth-heavier computer vision approach. Ships turn off their AIS sometimes when they're doing naughty things, but from what I understand they're usually relatively close to shore when they do that.
- patrickyeon 7y agoYou could possibly spot container ships at one instance in a day (the constellation only goes over any point twice a day, ~10.30 AM (local) and 12 hours later (no sunlight)). To what end? You are roughly tripling your power, data storage, and downlink costs, with a loss on your power production (and orbit control, because the Doves use differential drag for phasing) for a poor product that doesn't really have customers. If you want to track ships that want to be seen, basically everybody has AIS receivers up there (although I understand that's not trivial to sort out from space). If you want to track ships that aren't broadcasting, use radar.