Objectives of the Project
Maritime criminal activities become more and more organised. So, future solution should be set up for illicit activities such as clandestine immigration, terrorism and trafficking of drugs, weapons and illicit substances. Indeed, maritime traffic is peculiarly well suited to the development of illicit activities. For example, illegal migrant prefer maritime routes because they can enter through long sea borders where they can hardly be detected. Around 500.000 people enter the EU illegally every year, with few entry points: the Strait of Gibraltar, Italy and Malta islands, etc. The economy based on illegal migrants has generated $10 billions per year, placing it just after weapons and drug traffic.
Moreover, EU has no coordinated security approach on this matter as yet and is not currently able to track and monitor every ship in order to detect abnormal or illicit behaviour. This is why a common surveillance solution allowing Member States to track and fight illicit behaviours on a wide maritime area is imperatively needed.
Then, technical objectives of the ScanMaris project are to provide a new generation of maritime surveillance solution allowing:
- Overall and permanent coverage of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).
- Continuous collection and fusion of heterogeneous data provided by various types of sensors and external data sources.
- Supervised automatic detection of illicit behaviours.
- Compliance with the relevant national and EU legal requirements (privacy, data storage, proof gathering…).
No equipment deployments and data exploitation systems are currently able to answer all these requirements. However, progress has been made in long range sensors, heterogeneous data fusion and comportmental behaviours that could be usefully merged to build an innovative maritime surveillance solution for security applications.
The ScanMaris project will study, develop and experiment advanced algorithms to learn various vessel compartmental behaviours (Learning Engine) and to automatically extract abnormal behaviours (Rule Engine), such as illicit activities, from a global enriched tactical picture compilation of the vessel traffic over a wide area.