Expanded Vessel Detections with Sentinel-2 Optical Imagery
We’re expanding the view of human activity at sea with the launch of vessel detections based on Sentinel-2 optical satellite imagery. This new dataset adds detections from medium-resolution, daylight imagery, significantly increasing coverage and revealing smaller vessels, especially in nearshore waters where activity is often underreported.
Sentinel-2 imagery operates much like aerial photography from space, capturing visible and near-infrared light. Our machine learning models scan these images to identify vessels, estimate their size, speed and direction, and help distinguish true vessels from objects like buoys, infrastructure or debris.
With this release, we’re adding more than just detections. Each detection comes with an image thumbnail, allowing users to visually inspect the vessel in the context of its surroundings.
MCS officers, researchers and other stakeholders can now:
- Discover more vessels: Detect smaller vessels, including some that were not visible in radar imagery, thanks to Sentinel-2’s higher resolution (10 meters).
- Verify detections visually: See an image thumbnail for each detection to help confirm vessel presence and understand the local context.
- Access vessel characteristics: See estimated vessel length, orientation and speed (when wakes are visible) for each detection.
- Identify untracked vessels: Compare detections matched with AIS data to identify vessels operating without tracking systems.
- Download the dataset: Access the full dataset through our data download portal for your own analysis.
Why it matters
This release opens the door to new insights in enforcement, marine conservation and coastal fisheries. It’s already being used in research exploring nearshore fishing and vessel behavior in areas with limited AIS coverage.
By combining Sentinel-2 detections with existing AIS and radar datasets, stakeholders can build a more complete picture of human activity at sea.
Explore more
- To learn more about this dataset and the technology behind it, check out our Sentinel-2 launch story.
- On the platform, enable the “Imagery vessel detections (Optical)” layer in the Detections section.
- In our data download portal, download full, unfiltered Sentinel-2 detections data – Learn more.
- Share your feedback on the imagery vessel detections data.
