Innovation at the Heart of the CLS’s Process: Vision and Expertise for Maritime Surveillance

Fostering a culture of innovation, encouraging agility and initiative, and integrating incubators and intrapreneurship are all part of CLS’ core practice.

We need to be responsive in a changing world, so that we can adapt our solutions in anticipation of our customers’ changing needs. These different aspects must be deployed and coordinated through the definition and implementation of a genuine innovation strategy.

CLS’ Innovation Unit for Maritime Surveillance, headed by Guillaume Hajduch, is part of this innovation strategy.

What are the missions of the Maritime Surveillance Innovation Unit?

Its primary mission is to provide innovative solutions and expert support for maritime surveillance. Our research and analytics work, naturally benefits all our clients, whether they are offshore wind farm operators or fisheries monitoring companies.

For our daily missions dedicated to maritime surveillance applications, we focus on:

• Fusion of maritime information (AIS, compliance, shipping, imagery). This is directly usable in CLS’ Maritime Awareness System (MAS) which exploits and processes big data, allowing users to receive, store and query, in real-time, huge volumes of multiple data sources.

MAS is CLS’ key tool, used by maritime authorities worldwide, to extract maritime actionable intelligence from large quantities of data at a glance.

• Processing of high resolution optical and radar imagery data: we develop new algorithm tools and methodology to support surveillance, detection of illicit or abnormal behavior in the maritime and coastal domain.

Here again, it is a matter of continuous improvement for MAS and for our clients like the French Navy and EMSA (European Maritime Safety Agency).

• Expertise in quality control, calibration and validation of SAR sensors. This benefits from the SAR Mission Performance Cluster (SAR-MPC) in which CLS has been associated since 2012 as the prime contractor. In the framework of the Copernicus program of the European Commission, the project secures that the images provided by the Sentinel-1 SAR constellation achieve the targeted performances for the benefit of their users.

Co-development, agility, and intelligence

It is a fact, 58% of businesses are now leading co-creation projects to help drive innovation. By applying a principle of co-construction in close collaboration with our sales teams and by focusing on our customers’ needs, we are leveraging the power of co-creation to market new products.

Our mission covers scientific and technical monitoring, as well as R&D studies in the fields of AIS and satellite optical and radar sensors, with a strong collaboration with research laboratories such as IMT Atlantique, and University of Southern Brittany, to name two examples.

We participate as well to projects of the H2020/Horizon Europe program in collaboration with partners across Europe to develop and demonstrate emerging technologies in our field of expertise.

This collaborative approach can be THE way to discover new market opportunities, push product branding in new directions, or establish a presence in a completely new area.

In conjunction with the CLS DataLab, we define functional prototypes to test concepts and processes derived from customer needs.

We must also mention that we validate the scientific and the technical operational developments done by CLS’ Advanced Tech operational team, and the evaluation of the possible gap and its adjustment between the initial need and its realization, always in a customer-oriented state of mind.

In a win-win approach, we offer our expertise to the CLS operational teams, placing CLS staff in a position to propose suggestions and ideas, encouraging people to submit responses for potential adoption, developing an open culture, collective intelligence, and creating new spaces of innovation.

Maritime surveillance: Innovation at the heart of the process

The results are being integrated into MAS, our complete and real-time platform to monitor maritime activity designed for maritime authorities, to enrich automatic processing, to raise alarms, or added artificial intelligence.

These multiple data sets form the basis for performing real-time or historic surveillance on an area, fleet or vessel of interest, as well as creating alerts for specific events or vessel behavior.

MAS (Maritime Awareness System): Maritime traffic surveillance

Bridging theory approaches with applications, partnerships and research contracts with laboratories:

With IMT Atlantique:

• Co-supervision of Duong N’Guyen’s thesis, which led to the development of the GeoTrackNet network for the detection of statistically anomalous vessel behavior: https://www.theses.fr/2020LORIS567.pdf
• Scientific partnership in the framework of the ANR/ASTRID SESAME project. Development of neural networks for detection and characterization of ships on SAR images.
• Ongoing activities in the framework of a research contract on the use of Deep Learning techniques for the exploitation of satellite images in the maritime domain.

With UBS (University of Southern Brittany):

• Co-financing and co-supervision of Caglayan Tuna’s thesis on hierarchical segmentation of Earth observation image time series.