MARITIME SENTINEL — AI-Powered Maritime Surveillan

MARITIME SENTINEL

Satellite-powered maritime awareness for safer and more resilient seas

MARITIME SENTINEL is an innovative maritime surveillance and decision-support platform designed to improve maritime security and situational awareness by combining European satellite data, vessel tracking information and geospatial artificial intelligence.

Maritime environments face growing challenges, including illegal fishing, suspicious vessel activity, unauthorized operations and vessels that become difficult to track when their AIS (Automatic Identification System) signals are missing or inconsistent.

MARITIME SENTINEL addresses this problem by integrating Copernicus Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery with AIS data to identify potential discrepancies between satellite observations and reported vessel positions.

How it works

The platform combines three main capabilities:

• Satellite-based vessel detection: Uses Copernicus Sentinel-1 SAR imagery to detect vessels at sea, even in cloudy conditions and at night.
• AIS data correlation: Compares satellite-detected vessels with AIS positions to identify possible mismatches, unexplained absences or suspicious tracking gaps.
• Geospatial intelligence and anomaly analysis: Processes spatial and temporal information to highlight events that may require further investigation.

The resulting information is presented through an interactive dashboard, allowing users to explore maritime activity, visualize potential anomalies and understand why a particular event has been flagged.

European Space Technologies

MARITIME SENTINEL builds on European space capabilities, with a particular focus on:

• Copernicus: Sentinel-1 satellite imagery for all-weather maritime observation.
• Galileo: Potential future integration of navigation authentication technologies, including OSNMA, as an additional source of positioning integrity information.
• Open maritime data: AIS information and other relevant maritime datasets to enrich the analysis.

Expected impact

The project aims to support maritime authorities, environmental monitoring organizations and civil protection stakeholders by providing an additional source of evidence for maritime situational awareness.

By combining satellite observations with vessel tracking data, MARITIME SENTINEL can help identify activity that conventional AIS-based monitoring alone might overlook.

The platform is designed as a human-in-the-loop decision-support system: detected anomalies are not treated as proof of illegal activity, but as indicators that can be reviewed and investigated by qualified operators.

Our vision

To make maritime surveillance more accessible, transparent and data-driven through the intelligent use of European space technologies.

MARITIME SENTINEL — Seeing beyond AIS. Understanding what happens at sea.