It is the principle duty of the Marine Police to maintain law and order in the HKSAR waters and protect people’s life and property. As one of the maritime rescue units of Hong Kong, Marine Police plays a key role in performing maritime search and rescue operations (SAR) that provides 24/7 emergency response capability to locate, assist and evacuate persons in distress, regardless of weather and sea conditions.
The proposed system is to enhance the SAR capability utilising the existing land-based or ship mount EOS / camera system with an AI-driven search function that can search, detect and identify a person / vessel in distress at sea. The system comprises a network of high-resolution land based cameras and mobile cameras mounted on ships or drones, along with an AI-based software that can control and coordinate the networked cameras to perform sea surface sweeping and analyse the captured images in real-time.
The main objectives of the proposed system are:
- To detect and identify a person / vessel in distress at sea;
- To enable the network cameras to sweep the sea surface in a coordinated manner according to the optimised search route formulated by an AI algorithm;
- To enable multiple cameras to collaboratively detect the person / vessel in distress by analysing the same scene from multiple angles;
- To alert the rescue team on the location of the person / vessel in distress;
- To provide real-time updates on the person's location and situation to the rescue team.
The AI-powered automated camera system offers several advantages, including conducting search operations 24/7 with minimum human involvement, increasing resilience to adverse weather and sea conditions, improving efficiency of existing camera systems, reducing manpower demand and elimination of human fatigue. Furthermore, such a system can be easily expanded to include additional search capabilities (e.g. illegal immigrants and smuggling) in the future.
