In July 2024 ISG was one of the selected participants in the Australian Geospatial Intelligence Organisation (AGO) programme known as AGO Labs, managed by FrontierSI. ISG’s project tilted “Depths of the deep blue sea” had the objective of modernising existing processes and enriching data used to understand the water column. Specifically, the goal was to automate the labour-intensive processes of data quality assessment and quality control (QC) that currently can take up to 1 year to deliver quality-checked ocean data to the Navy.
After an intense period of data preprocessing analysis and statistical modelling and collaborating with AGO Hydrographic experts in Wollongong, NSW – in late November 2024 ISG delivered a working prototype of its MARINE tool (Monitoring And Near-Real-Time Data Integrity for Nautical Environments) that fulfilled AGO’s objectives and specifically delivered these outcomes:
- Delivery of an automated near-real-time QC tool
- Automated outlier detection using advanced statistical techniques
- Reduced time to process data from up to 1 year to under 1 hour
- Increased analysis rate from 30 profiles/day to 1500+ profiles/hour
- A standardised & repeatable methodology to perform QC
- Demonstration of the tool to AGO, including accuracy results
AGO and Royal Australian Navy staff stated that they were very impressed with the prototype product, especially considering the short development timeframe. ISG looks forward to cooperating with Defence in 2025 to further develop the prototype for operational use.
Left: XBT probe deployment – one of the sensor types processed by MARINE.
Right: Example of MARINE automatically detecting bad data on an XBT profile. (Green = good data, red = bad data)