Argo: Towards Small Vessel Detection for Humanitarian Purposes

Argo: Towards Small Vessel Detection for Humanitarian Purposes

Elisabeth Moser, Selina Meyer, Maximilian Schmidhuber, Daniel Ketterer, Matthias Eberhardt

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI for Good - Demos. Pages 5245-5248. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/728

Refugees trying to get to Europe via the Mediterranean often face human rights violations. The present situation is not in line with the UN's SDG's 10 and 16. We present Argo: a semi-automatically created vessel classification dataset focused on small boats, with the aim to enable NGOs and the public to detect refugee boats in satellite imagery. We achieve a classification recall of 91% on small ships. With a tool developed on top of the results presented here, NGOs could collect information and hold institutions participating in illegal activities accountable.
Keywords:
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Sustainable Development Goals
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: Societal Impact of AI