For all those who have fished near busy shipping lanes, searched for buoys in the foggy dark, or had the terror of someone going overboard, Nobeltec is partnering with SEA.AI to bring an added measure of safety, as well as operational efficiency, to its TimeZero Pro software.

“Our system includes optical sensors and infared sensors connected to artificial intelligence and machine learning,” says Hernando Giraldo, president of SEA.AI in the US. “As our AI algorithms analyze the images and determine the identity of a target, that gets layered onto the TimeZero display along with the radar and AIS targets.”

The big selling point of the new technology is that it fills in some gaps left by radar and AI, and enhances situational awareness. The key to that improvement in situational awareness is the sensitivity of the SEA.AI cameras, which reportedly can identify buoys, floating debris, and people in the water, marine mammals, and other targets. “That level of identification can be good out to 700 meters,” says Giraldo. “And that is day and night due to the combination of sensors in our cameras.” In addition to the fine discernment of objects at the surface, the SEA.AI cameras can identify small boats out thousands of meters, and large ships as far as the horizon.

SEA.AI makes a variety of camera models, and Nobeltec is integrating the Sentry Camera with TimeZero Pro. “Our sailboat models are forward looking, but the Sentry rotates 360 degrees,” says Giraldo, noting that it can also tilt plus or minus 20 degrees.

The SEA.AI software employs convolutional neural networks and machine learning, and according to Giraldo has been trained with millions of images. The software superimposes a bounding box around items in an image and assigns an identity to it, along with a level of confidence number between 0 and 1, a 1 being completely confident. As more and more images are fed into the program it “learns” how to identify objects with increasing accuracy. 

“The company is based in Austria. But most of the imaging work is done in Portugal,” says Giraldo. “Our customers can opt in to the training program if they want, sharing images with our system, but most prefer to maintain their privacy.” Nonetheless, Giraldo notes that the technology keeps improving. “It’s getting better every day,” he says. “Right now, the cost of our systems ranges from $10,000 to under $50,000, but I expect those to go down.”

The decision to integrate the SEA.AI system with TimeZero Pro made sense for both companies. “Let’s face it,” says Giraldo. “Wheelhouses are getting too busy, there are too many screens. It makes sense to have more information presented clearly on one display.”

So far, Giraldo is not aware of any sales to commercial fishing vessel owners, but SEA.AI and Nobeltec will both have booths at the upcoming Pacific Marine Expo where fishermen can take a closer look at the technology.