AI and satellite imagery used to create clearest map of human activity at sea | Hacker News Reader

AI and satellite imagery used to create clearest map of human activity at sea

theverge.com

In short, 72–76% of the world’s industrial fishing, and 21–30% of transport and energy, vessel activity are missing from public tracking systems. The actual article from Nature, in open access: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06825-8

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856394

And also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38866256

This is good research but the hinting that turning off AIS is from ill intent with fishing is not universally true. I have lived and worked on Alaskan fishing boats on and off for a while now. Most people turn off AIS or don't run it at all so they don't reveal their fishing spots to other vessels.

This is going to be an ongoing hurdle for most fisheries if more complete tracking is the goal.

Can anyone hint me at some websites where I can explore the Sentinel-1 images directly?

Seems like https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/browser/ is the place to go.

Looks like you need to register for a (free) account, though.

SentinelHub EO Browser is, as the name suggests, a browser based explorer of Sentinel imagery

You can even download subsets of the data for free (requires login though). It's one of the simplest ways to get started exploring Sentinel imagery IMHO

https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/eo-browser/

The Planetary Computer from Microsoft has an explore tool, which includes Sentinel-1 at any time and location, rendered on-the-fly. Free open access. No account required.

https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/explore?c=11.6778%2C...

But can we trust the hallucinations of the “AI”?

We're not talking about putting the pictures into ChatGPT here.

Anyway, from their tests using standard CNN practices: "Our best model achieved on the test set an F1 score of 0.97 (accuracy = 97.5%) for the classification task and a R2 score of 0.84 (RMSE = 21.9 m, or about 1 image pixel) for the length-estimation task."

no - enhanced resolution is very iffy and subject to gaming etc

secondly, there is no perfect way to measure accuracy of remote sensing for many reasons

They're tracking a vessel over time, though. Surely any errors and inaccuracies are negated over a long enough time horizon.

"Advances in AI and satellite imagery allowed researchers to create the clearest picture yet of human activity at sea"

Can someone find something better so we can do a class action lawsuit for deceit?

No, for various reasons including "you don't have standing in 99.5% of the world's courts", "most countries don't have legal systems where you can do class action lawsuits"[0], and "what exactly is the thing you're saying has caused you a loss here anyway, large numbers of individuals collectively failing to tell their designated authorities that they were fishing, or those authorities not making this information easily available to the international community?"

[0] Apparently. I'm not a lawyer, I'm just going with what this says: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/class-action/why-most-nations-... and some even fuzzier between-the-lines reading of the wikipedia page, and that combination is a game-of-telephone disaster if ever there was one…

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