Using machine learning for fault detection in lighthouse light sensors
It addresses a specific safety issue in maritime navigation by automating fault detection for lighthouse sensors, but is incremental as it applies standard machine learning methods to a new domain.
This paper tackles the problem of detecting malfunctions in lighthouse light sensors that cause timing misalignments, and finds that a multi-layer perceptron algorithm can detect timing discrepancies as small as 10-15 minutes.
Lighthouses play a crucial role in ensuring maritime safety by signaling hazardous areas such as dangerous coastlines, shoals, reefs, and rocks, along with aiding harbor entries and aerial navigation. This is achieved through the use of photoresistor sensors that activate or deactivate based on the time of day. However, a significant issue is the potential malfunction of these sensors, leading to the gradual misalignment of the light's operational timing. This paper introduces an innovative machine learning-based approach for automatically detecting such malfunctions. We evaluate four distinct algorithms: decision trees, random forest, extreme gradient boosting, and multi-layer perceptron. Our findings indicate that the multi-layer perceptron is the most effective, capable of detecting timing discrepancies as small as 10-15 minutes. This accuracy makes it a highly efficient tool for automating the detection of faults in lighthouse light sensors.