Charles River Analytics has received a $1.8 million contract to classify and identify ships and other vessels at sea. The Automatic Text Extraction for Awareness in the Maritime (A-TEAM) system works with existing labeled image data sets and banks of unannotated maritime images to enable automated systems to recognize text on ships at sea.

Knowing the ship’s name and International Maritime Organization (IMO) number will help the U.S. Navy identify threat actors more easily and conduct efficient surveillance on water. The ability to go beyond just detecting and classifying to actually identifying the ships is an extension of the Awarion product that Charles River Analytics has been developing in parallel.

Charles River’s Awarion maritime perception tool can already detect and classify ships. By integrating this text recognition capability, it can now identify specific ships at sea to track longer-term behavior and build models to determine when a ship is behaving in an unusual manner.

A-TEAM will eventually incorporate multi-sensor data—from radar and cameras, for example—to build an even more cohesive picture for identification.

Read about Charles River Analytics’ tech in the April issue of ST.