SAMUDRA: Upgraded Sea Surveillance Technology to Prevent Sea Exploitation

Yoga Febrian Pratama

Tohoku University, 2017

Abstract
Indonesia, like Japan, is an archipelago that consist of several huge islands in addition to smaller ones.
However, unlike Japan, Indonesia is recognized as an archipelagic state by United Nations (UN). This provides
Indonesia with sovereignty over wider range of the sea surrounding their island. However, despite the power
at hand, Indonesian sea is often exploited by other nation ships and sometimes its own people. This essay
would propose Samudra 1 , a sea surveillance technology, with the ability to read abnormalities in the
condition of the ocean and identify vessels over bodies of water.

I. Introduction

A. Indonesia as Archipelagic States Compared to Japan

An archipelagic state is a term that is designated to countries which hold an

archipelago. There are only 5 nation that acquires the approval of such term from

United Nations. They are Indonesia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Bahamas, and

Philippines. They acquire sovereignty to control activities over their own sea in

which other countries should respect. In theory, this would lead to better control

and protection over their sea,

1
Samudra (Indonesian) is loosely translated to English as ocean.
 However, in practice, Indonesian sea is often exploited not only by other countries

but also by its own people. In comparison, Japan, despite being an archipelago,

does not acquire de jure recognition as Archipelagic State. However, better

protection of sea against exploitation was shown. This does not prove that the

recognition has no use, but rather show that there is a difference in the method

that both countries use to protect their sea.

B. Sea Exploitation in Indonesia

Production and effectivity of management of sea in Indonesia has been suffering

from poorly planned coastal development, overfishing, and unsustainable “fish-

farming” practices all that is done over Indonesian sea. In addition to this, the

quality of Indonesian sea is further deteriorated by the global threat of ocean

acidification. Both had caused serious threat to around 95% of coral reef in

Indonesia. It does not stop there, marine production and other benefits the ocean

provide is also threatened.

Measures to counter this negative impact has been done, starting from

revitalization of sea and stronger regulations on ocean-related activities. These

regulations depend more on the determination of people to obey the rules.

 However, it is naïve to rely on this, especially considering that people has the

C. Sea Surveillance Technology

Sea Surveillance Technology (SST) is not a new idea, it has been used widely by

other countries, even Indonesia to check the condition of their ocean. Sea

surveillance technology uses sensors placed on certain location based on

previous experiences or routines due to their limited surveillance area. Typical

surveillance system conjures up tracks of vessels over the map to show the

position, course, and speed of the ship. More advanced system may even show

history and identity of the ship.

Tracking performance relies on two interrelated functions: track updating, the

method of incorporating newer result to previous estimation, and return-to-track

correlation, the selection process that is done by the sensor for track overhauling.

However, due to the vicinity of targets in the same region, in addition to clutter

and false alarms, these functions are often calculated imperfectly. Since ordinary

filters, for example the Kalman filter, don't represent such corresponding errors,

corrupted execution is often done, resulting in unreliable and unrealistic

estimation of data.
II. Discussion

A. Problems with Typical SST

Typical SST is good enough to support surveillance, it can read anomalies from

sensor station spread all over the nation. The sensor station will transmit data to

regional communication centers to process the data before finally sending final

results to national center towers. The diagram representing these connections are

shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Connections between sensor stations, regional command and control

center, and national command and control center.

The problem with this system is the sensors are immobile, limiting range of

detection. Typical performance value includes detection range at maximum 20

km and recognition range at maximum 12 km. This is pretty good for countries

with smaller ocean areas. However, for countries like Indonesia, where
 sovereignty zone includes up to 300 km from the outermost beachline, it is very

costly to build a lot of sensor stations. Therefore, usually the government only

implement such scheme on areas where trespassing or major threats have been

done. In other areas, sea police are usually stationed. However, its highly

ineffective.

Other problems, also aforementioned, is the fact that the filter used does not

integrate calculations or measurement error. These errors are crucial in calculation

as a small mistake may cause false alarms. Most of the system used nowadays

does not integrate this error calculation. For non-archipelagic countries, it might

be okay. However, for Indonesia, false alarms cause negative impact, such as

waste of personnel and energy.

B. Concept of SAMUDRA

SAMUDRA, like other SSTs, serves to detect vessel tracks and abnormalities in

their activities. In addition to this, SAMUDRA will be able to detect the condition

of water in their range. It also uses sensors and radar to obtain the needed data

for calculation.

However, there are a few differences between SAMUDRA and other typical SSTs.
 The first difference, also the major one, is that SAMUDRA is mobile. One of the

problems with common surveillance systems is one their immobility that limits

their range. Usually sensors are placed in several places depending on previous

cases of threats, however these sensors itself have limited range. The further the

target is from the sensor, the less effective this sensor will be. By making it mobile,

we let SAMUDRA to venture closer to an anomaly source such that it can confirm

the anomaly source with better precision.

The next difference is in the filter used. It will be personally customized to include

calculations and measurement errors for clutters and multiple target problems.

This is done by checking whether any anomalies happen during detection. Using

Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), complex cluster models are introduced. It will

be able to approximate complex distributions of data when it does not behave

accordingly to any common routines.

In addition, sensors for chemical components will be attached to SAMUDRA.

Sensors will detect abnormal chemical components and sends certain commands

to SAMUDRA electronically such that it will return to the regional control centers

after taking water sample.

C. Benefit of SAMUDRA
 SAMUDRA main benefit is that it combines multiple functions into one single

object. This deletes the need for multiple data from different sensors to be

processed later as SAMUDRA would be able to process them all. Mobility is

beneficial for countries that has wide bodies of water like Indonesia and Japan.

Several SAMUDRA can be placed in the ocean and they would move freely when

they detect anomalies or vessel movements in bodies of water, erasing the need

to place multiple sensors in one single area and it will also take wider range of

detection area. In addition to this, anomaly in composition of sea water can also

be detected to find out dangerous chemicals inside the water composition. This

function is mostly beneficial for Indonesia as water pollution rate is high.

D. Problem and Challenges to SAMUDRA

Several problems might cause trouble to both the development and post-

development of SAMUDRA. The first one is finding an appropriate anomaly

threshold, which also mean regulating the system level of sensitivity. For the case

of GMM, raising the value of threshold will increase sensitivity of sensors as it

finds more anomalies. However, this will also lead to more false alarms as it might

read unimportant data and send it off as anomalies. Lowering it will instead

causes subtle anomalies to be dismissed. Thus, it is very important that the system
 sensitivity can be either remotely controlled or flexibly changed depending on

the condition of surrounding area. Another possible problem would be the fact

that the model considers only momentary state of vessel motion, which means it

would not consider previous movement states. Furthermore, state of surrounding

vessels is not considered. This would be harmful as there as several cases like

hijacking or smuggling, which develops over time and involve multiple vessels.

However, it is possible to take care of this problem by experimentally training the

system to read spaces and more than one source using deep learning.

III. Conclusion

The essay had proposed an upgraded version of typical sea surveillance system, called

SAMUDRA. The main reason for this development of sophisticated surveillance

system is the deteriorating quality of Indonesian sea due to exploitation and natural

activities. SAMUDRA is projected to use GMM model for anomalies detection that

will lead to better calculation and result will be more accurate and reliable.

IV. References

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Information Fusion: Architectures, Algorithms, and Applications 2006, Belur V.

Dasarathy, Editor, 624203 (Apr. 18, 2006).

[2] Toru Komiya, Masao Mori. Local Solutions of Surveillance Routing Problem By

Partitioning The Objective Ships. Journal of the Operations Research Society of Japan.

1999, Vol.42, No.3, p.352.

[3] Toru Komiya, Masao Mori. For Clean and Safe Space Environment: Three-

Dimensional Standard Routing Problem. Journal of the Operations Research Society

of Japan. 2002, Vol.45, No.2, p.214.

[4] Veerbeek J. J., Mixture Models for Clustering and Dimension Reduction, PhD thesis,

University of Amsterdam, 2004.

[5] Verbeek J.J., Vlassis N., Kröse B., Efficient Greedy Learning of Gaussian Mixture

Models, Neural Computation, 15(2):469-485, 2003.