According to MARPOL 73/78, the principles have been determined to prevent pollution of the marine environment. However, illegal discharges by ships above the permitted limits in prohibited areas persist. The protection of coasts and marine waters faces complex and multifaceted challenges. The marine and coastal ecosystem are especially threatened by sea-based contaminants of anthropogenic actions. Therefore, the 2002 EU Recommendation on Integrated Coastal Zone Management and the 2008 Marine Strategy Framework Directive have been developed in order to preserve all European coasts and marine waters. To address these problems and support EU regulations, the idea of SMARTPOL has emerged with the aim of producing technological solutions for marine pollution detection while establishing data services which will be able to integrate with existing EU services in synergy with the European Green Deal. From this point of view, SMARTPOL aims to present a novel and compact pollution detection, monitoring and analysis system architecture in order to monitor marine fields and to detect different types of marine pollution consisting of hardware and software components. In sum, integration of different types of sensors (e.g. remote sensing, UAV and USV integrated IoT), development of marine pollution detection algorithm using sensor data and the state-of-the-art intelligent system technologies including AI-based image processing, autonomous navigation and smart communication system will be presented as R&I objectives of the project.
