When a ship leaves port, many ship owners and managers don’t have complete visibility into their daily operations. While captain’s reports and satellite communications are helpful, there is no replacement for knowing with complete confidence that the ship and crew alike are safe at sea: scheduled maintenance occurs on time, safety procedures are consistently followed, and cargo remains secure at all times.
The solution? Installing an AI-powered maritime CCTV system.
This increasingly popular investment typically includes a network of cameras installed onboard the ship to continuously capture footage of maritime operations – from loading and unloading cargo to maintenance and bridge activity.
Ship owners and managers can access this footage in real-time, but the intention is not to watch all of the footage. In contrast to traditional CCTV, Artificial Intelligence “watches” the footage for you, alerting the team to any issues and creating high-level reports and analytics to identify patterns in daily operations to be improved.
With this new technology, ship owners and managers can gain significant competitive advantages by installing AI-powered maritime CCTV.
What is AI-Powered Maritime CCTV?
AI-powered maritime CCTV is a network of connected cameras on board where artificial intelligence watches and analyzes footage from multiple locations in real-time. Once the system is up and running, the cameras—placed at key locations like the cargo hold, bridge, and engine room—send footage directly to captains, ship owners, and ship managers in an all-in-one dashboard surfacing important moments, trends, or issues relevant to their immediate attention.
Over time, AI learns as it processes this footage, identifying patterns for improvement and benchmarking metrics such as navigational safety, security incidents, routine maintenance, regulatory compliance and more across your fleet. In this way, shipowners, captains, and crew can take appropriate action to prevent damage, improve safety protocols, or receive updates as needed.
Traditional Maritime CCTV vs. AI-Powered Maritime CCTV
On the surface, AI-powered maritime CCTV looks very similar to traditional maritime CCTV. In both, there is a network of cameras recording hundreds of hours of footage from multiple locations. With both, you can easily rewind and replay key moments when investigating safety incidents or to understand onboard operations.
What’s different, and more valuable, is that AI-powered maritime CCTV provides the appropriate context to CCTV footage. With AI plugged into every aspect of ship operations, you receive analysis that takes into account ship status, time of day, weather and sea conditions, and typical activities for any given time. In this way, you can engage in preventive surveillance—stopping incidents or accidents before they occur.
What’s more, AI can watch all of your footage at once, without missing a beat. To do this properly would require hiring multiple people to watch footage from each ship in your fleet—a near-impossible task for even the most attentive employees. The truth is, many hours of traditional maritime CCTV footage remains unwatched and inaccessible both to onboard crew and management ashore, making it difficult to gain more visibility into maritime operations unless a major incident has already occurred—and by then, it’s too late.
What to Consider When Purchasing AI-Powered Maritime CCTV
When you invest in maritime CCTV, you’re investing in building a more efficient, safer fleet. As you think about the kind of technology that’s best for you, consider:
- What you want to see: Without maritime CCTV, the lack of sea-shore visibility leads to significant operational inefficiencies and often results in damages from incidents and accidents. But there are a wide variety of applications for this technology, including safety and compliance, bridge conduct, security risk mitigation, environmental concerns, and more. Define ahead of time what matters the most to your maritime operations to get the most out of your purchase.
- What data you want to track: If you choose an AI-powered maritime CCTV option, you can customize your dashboard to surface the metrics that matter the most to your operations. Adding a server and advanced computer vision software delivers dramatic benefits in the utilization of the marine CCTV system, including automatic and digital detection of events onboard, early hazard identification, and more efficient ship-to-shore communication.
- Your return on investment: Before going forward, evaluate the costs against the potential benefits. Costs include upfront capital expenditure (CapEx) as well as operating expenses for ongoing maintenance (OpEx), as well as service and spare parts. Once you’ve evaluated the costs of purchasing and installing equipment onboard, a review and assessment of the potential benefits can yield valuable insights into the entire process. A good place to start is a detailed review of incident data across the fleet over the last 5 years. Determine the overall cost of incidents incurred that could have been prevented.
What AI-Powered Maritime CCTV Looks Like for Real Ships
We created ShipIn’s AI-powered maritime CCTV system by asking ship owners, “What would you want to see and know, if you were able to be on board your ship during a voyage?”
ZEABORN Ship Management decided to partner with ShipIn and install AI-Powered Maritime CCTV onboard their fleet of managed vessels. Their team needed more visibility into crew compliance with safety procedures, equipment maintenance schedules, and other activities taking place on board.
“The most surprising thing that we saw when working with ShipIn was the amount of reported and recorded incidents that we have. What that told us is that the traditional way of doing things with near-miss reports is just tremendously outdated,” explained Tjard Juergens, SVP of Business Development at ZEABORN.
Once deployed, the team was able to achieve a 17% increase in bridge watch compliance across their fleet by using FleetVision.
Instituting new training practices and building awareness across the team has significantly improved bridge performance, improving navigational safety for all on board. These changes were then rolled out to the entire fleet, improving safety protocols for the entire organization.
Learn how ShipIn is helping global maritime companies manage their fleet.
ShipIn Gives You Complete Visibility Into Your Maritime Operations
ShipIn’s FleetVision platform gives you a complete picture of your ship operations through AI-powered maritime CCTV. Using the platform, you can analyze key insights using artificial intelligence (AI) and communicate continuously between ship and shore.
Designed with ship managers and seafarers in mind, ShipIn allows your team to:
- Gain real-time hazard detection and visibility into important areas of the ship
- Allow for remote guidance between shore management and crew
- Log events automatically to comply with regulations
- Assess crew competency and best practices
See how ShipIn can help you build a stronger safety culture for your maritime organization today.
