Fishery Management from Space: Matching VIIRS Boat Detection with VMS Tracks

Tracking of fishing vessels are usually done by GPS based tracking systems like AIS or VMS. However these on-board tracking systems are can be turned off or interrupted. Recently techniques to detect vessels with satellite images are also rapidly developing. Such approach provides a handy alternative for vessel monitoring. The authors had developed an operational service to detect lights emitted by fishing vessels operating at night with VIIRS DNB imagery. However satellite based detection cannot distinguish the attributes of vessels such as gear type or tonnage, not to mention their registered ID. Therefore we further developed a process to cross match the records of satellite detected vessels with GPS tracks acquired by VMS. This study shows the result of the Indonesia case study with 32 months worth of data. From the cross matching result we can further derive interesting results such as the lighting pattern of different gear types operating in individual fishing grounds.