Objectives of the service
Ships report their identity and position over the Automatic Identification System (AIS), but a vessel can switch its transponder off, broadcast a false position or have its signal jammed. Insurers, banks, commodity traders and maritime authorities then have a risk flag and no evidence to resolve it, which hides sanctions evasion, illicit trade and unreported emissions, and leaves insurance claims open to dispute.
The Earth Observation-Enhanced Vessel Transparency Index (EO-VTI™) recognises individual ships by their appearance in free Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar and Sentinel-2 optical imagery, without relying on AIS, and so gives independent evidence of where a vessel was when its AIS was off, spoofed or jammed. The feasibility study asked whether vessels can be identified this way reliably enough to act on, whether customers need that evidence in their own work, and whether it can be sold as a service. It closed with a positive answer to each and a plan for a Pilot Project to take the service to market.
Users and their needs
The service is for maritime risk and compliance professionals in four segments: marine insurers, trade finance institutions, government maritime agencies and commodity traders. It will reach them through Lloyd’s List Intelligence (LLI), th[LT2.1]e champion user of the study, which provides maritime risk and compliance intelligence to more than 4,000 organisations through its Seasearcher platform.
LLI’s leadership and its product, data science, sales and editorial teams took part in three customer workshops during the study, and LLI arranged interviews with organisations in government maritime enforcement, defence advisory and commodity trading.
User needs include:
- Evidence that confirms or rules out a vessel’s identity and position, rather than another probabilistic risk flag
- Coverage of wide areas at an affordable cost, since customers told us that the price of commercial imagery, rather than its capability, is what keeps satellite tools out of their hands
- Results inside the tools they already use, with a stated confidence and the imagery behind each finding
Key challenges include:
- Clouds, which hide ships from optical satellites and is offset by radar
- The deep ocean, which free satellite imagery does not cover
- Small vessels, below about 40 m, which free 10-m imagery cannot reliably identify
- Sister ships of the same design, which look alike from space and are told apart with AIS and voyage information
Service/ system concept
EO-VTI™ detects ships in each new satellite image, measures each vessel’s appearance and compares it with earlier sightings, so that a ship can be recognised whether or not it is broadcasting its identity. The capability is delivered as two services:
- Area monitoring keeps watch over a port, anchorage or strait, reporting which vessels are present after each satellite pass, which of them are not broadcasting AIS or are broadcasting a position somewhere else, and their arrivals, departures and possible ship-to-ship transfers.
- Vessel investigation answers a question about a single ship, typically when its AIS track goes dark, jumps implausibly or contradicts other evidence, by searching the imagery for it and returning the likely sightings with a stated confidence and the evidence behind them.
Space Added Value
AIS depends on the ship’s cooperation; satellite imagery does not. Space is the only independent witness.
- Multispectral imagery measures what a hull looks like, repeatably. Sentinel-2 records each hull in thirteen bands of light on a calibrated, consistent basis on every pass, so a ship seen today can be compared with the same ship seen months earlier and hundreds of kilometres away.
- Radar sees through cloud and in darkness. Sentinel-1 detects vessels at night and under cloud, when optical imagery is lost.
- Free and open data makes every result reproducible and affordable. A customer, an auditor or a court can obtain the same Copernicus scenes, and the imagery cost does not rise with each additional area or vessel monitored.
- Routine, wide-area coverage. Sentinel-2 images every coastal and enclosed sea on a fixed schedule, including the straits, ports and anchorages where customers’ questions are concentrated.
Current Status
The EO-VTI™ feasibility study has concluded.
At its Final Review with the European Space Agency (ESA) in September 2026, the team showed that individual ships can be identified from free satellite imagery alone. Across every vessel seen repeatedly in the Persian Gulf in one month, the system ranked the correct ship first 82% of the time and within its top five 90% of the time. At two crowded anchorages near the Strait of Hormuz, with its settings fixed a year in advance, it rejected 94% to 95% of false identity claims. In the Mediterranean it followed one ship nine times in nine days, including twice at night by radar. ESA judged the technology to have reached technology readiness level (TRL) 5 to 6, a clear demonstration of technical feasibility.
The Final Report has been delivered and the Final Presentation is scheduled for November 2026. BolgiaTen is now preparing an Outline Proposal for a 24-month Pilot Project under ESA’s Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) programme, to take the service to full operation inside Seasearcher.
Prime Contractor(s)
