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SIH26143SoftwareDisaster Management

Leveraging satellite imagery to determine Oil spills at sea along with AIS data correlations to identify vessel responsible for the spill.

National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO)

Ideas submitted
275 / 500
Deadline
30 September 2026
Category
Software
Theme
Disaster Management

Looks like it needs

Computer VisionData / Analytics

• Background Marine oil spills inflict great damage on marine ecosystems and several times remains un-attributable to the vessel causing such spills. Leveraging satellite imagery along with AIS data will enable detection of oil spills and vessel responsible for the same. • Description The core challenge attempts to facilitate detection of oil spills and also in identifying the polluting vessel using remote sensing satellite data, such as SAR and EO imagery and AIS data. Participants are to design an intelligent automated pipeline to do the following: (a) Detect and characterise the oil spill and calculating geometric properties and age if feasible. (b) Using oceanographic and meteorological data, it is envisaged to trace the slick towards the origin point and time, predict the future flow of the slick, and (c) analyse and attribute the spill to a vessel using historic AIS data to reconstruct vessel traffic around the origin window in space and time. The irrelevant traffic is to be filtered out and potential suspect vessels are to be scored considering various aspects such as proximity, trajectory, behavioural anomalies etc. • Expected Solution An automated detection and hindcasting machine learning model that identified oils slicks from satellite imagery, mapping their drift paths backward and forward. It also ranks potential culprit vessel based on spatio-temporal correlation with AIS data. A suitable visual interface is also to be developed.

How contested this one is

as of 28 Sept
275ideas submitted+80 in 2 days

That puts it 36th of the 240 statements that have any ideas at all, out of 240 on the board. It is moving, so the field here is already forming.

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What a jury will ask about this

  1. 01“Who actually faces this problem today?”

    What works: Naming one real person and what they do instead right now. Reading the statement back is not an answer, they already read it.

  2. 02“This already exists. Why yours?”

    What works: That existing tools are consumer products. Yours is built for the ministry, works offline, in the local language, on official data.

  3. 03“Then why has nobody solved it yet?”

    What works: The real blocker. No connectivity, no incentive, nobody owns the data. You only know this if you read the ministry's own reports.

All 18 questions, with the trap answers →

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