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Concepts

Gain a basic understanding of VAKE's user experience and wording so you can set up reports and navigate efficiently.


Pathfinder​

When interested in a specific vessel, Pathfinder is your starting point. It will help you understand a vessel’s previous activity, ongoing activity, and future activity.

Pathfinder scans through terabytes of historical data to help tell the true story about the whereabouts of the vessel and its compliance with mandatory AIS reporting. It traces the vessel's transmitted AIS signals and retrieves corresponding satellite images of the vessel, allowing you to inspect and assess hypotheses of false reporting visually. If a vessel does not transmit AIS positions for longer periods of time, Pathfinder automatically searches for it in satellite imagery covering the vessel's possibility area.


Overwatch​

When interested in a specific area, Overwatch is your starting point. It will help you monitor an Area of Interest (AoI) to understand potential hidden activity happening around critical infrastructure, ports, areas or economic zones.

In addition to helping uncover unreported vessel activity within a specified area, Overwatch gives a better understanding over time of heat spots for hidden activity. Whether it is unreported fishing, transshipments or spoofing or other.


Clearview​

When you are looking to identify a dark vessel, you are using VAKE Clearview in one way or another. Either from within Pathfinder, from within Overwatch, or as a standalone service.

Clearview is a machine learning-based solution for identifying detected dark vessels in multispectral satellite imagery based on collected vessel signatures. To aid in identifying dark observations, Clearview searches an extensive vessel signature database, which is built up of historical observations of all vessels globally from 2016 until now.

When using Clearview through Overwatch, you will be presented with a list of candidate vessel identities visually similar to the dark observation, within reach of the observation, and not observed elsewhere.

Clearview may also be used to efficiently search for a specific vessel when its location is unknown. This is how you will use it in combination with Pathfinder. Clearview will then search for dark vessels that are visually similar in vast areas to try to relocate the vessel during the dark period.