Border protection - on a laptop

It's a high-tech eye in the sky - and it's having a major impact on the sea.

Boat detection software developed at the University of Adelaide is being trialled by the Federal Government to help protect Australia's maritime borders.

Called Scylla, the software analyses huge amounts of data fed from unmanned planes - known as an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAV - and can automatically detect vessels at sea, saving human operators hours of painstaking scrutiny.

One of the key developers of Scylla, Dr Anton van den Hengel from the university's School of Computer Science, said a recent trial of both the software and the unmanned planes in Western Australia had been encouraging.

"For the trial, we went to Monkey Bay (near Carnarvon) in Western Australia because of the marine parks there," he said. "We wanted to be able to test our equipment on the commercial fishing vessels which operate around that area, because while they are not allowed to fish within the parks they are allowed to move within them.

"Scylla works by being able to automatically detect vessels at sea and then observe their behaviour. When this is combined with the unmanned aircraft also being trialled, it means a lot less work for human operators.

"We attached a camera to the UAV, and then ran Scylla on the video stream which came back to my laptop.

"When Scylla detects a boat, it saves the relevant segment of the video so it can be later analysed by a human operator on computer.

"By doing this, it massively reduces the amount of video the operator needs to view to analyse the behaviour of all visible vessels over a day - instead of 10 hours of raw footage, Scylla reduces it to a few minutes of concentrated footage."

Scylla has been developed by the university through its involvement with the Cooperative Research Centre for Sensor Signal and Information Processing.

Story by Ben Osborne