Artificial intelligence will soon play a key role in monitoring Japan's remote border islands, reporting abnormalities in their vicinities by using satellite image analysis.
The Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry plans to introduce a system sometime next fiscal year to manage port facilities on Japan's southernmost island, Okinotorishima, as well as its easternmost island, Minami-Torishima, and monitor waters around the two islands. The envisaged system, which will analyze satellite images of the islands, is aimed at identifying damage to relevant facilities at an early date.
Minami-Torishima island is located about 1,950 kilometers away from the Japanese mainland, while Okinotorishima island is about 1,700 kilometers distant.
The islands, both part of the village of Ogasawara, Tokyo, serve as the base point for Japan's border and an exclusive economic zone, therefore they need to be preserved to maintain maritime interests.
A Japan Meteorological Agency official among others is stationed on Minami-Torishima island, while there is no one dispatched to Okinotorishima. Due to severe weather conditions, monitoring activities by aircraft and ships are limited around the islands.
The new monitoring system will acquire image data of the islands and the surrounding areas from satellites operated by private and other entities. It will then analyze the data using AI and automatically notify the ministry's relevant department when it detects abnormalities in the facilities, including problems caused by typhoons or possible collisions with drifting objects.
Within the current fiscal year, the government will verify the frequency of image acquisition, the accuracy of images necessary for data analysis and areas subject to monitoring, among other factors, to create a basic data set for the AI to identify abnormalities.
The government will also build a monitoring system using both satellites and AI in the waters around Japan. Under the system, AI will analyze whether there are any suspicious activities, such as illegal operations and smuggling, by using information from the Automatic Identification System installed on ships and such data as satellite images. The government hopes to detect abnormal activities early on so that it can swiftly deal with matters.
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