Corrosion is an inevitable factor for ships and is a major challenge for the industry. The deterioration of the steel structures causes higher maintenance costs, system failures and shortens service life. 

Today surveyors have to go onboard a ship to carry out their inspections and check for corrosion, coating defects, cracks, shape deformations and such like. Finding corrosion and coating breakdown depends on close-up visual inspection, while the assessment levels are estimated according to the surveyor’s experience. 

This traditional way of doing inspections is not optimal and challenges class to develop more effective inspection tools, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to automatically detect corrosion and coating breakdown, replacing time-consuming and costly close-up visual inspections. 

DNV GL’s research work aims to facilitate the surveyor’s task by reducing their presence onboard the ship while increasing their efficiency in corrosion inspection.