Real-Time Safety in Large Shipyards: How to Respond 90% Faster with AI

Shipyards are the frontlines of industrial work, where high-risk activities such as working with large structures, working at height, welding, and cutting occur regularly. According to the Korean Ministry of Employment and Labor, the country’s shipbuilding industry has already seen nine serious accidents involving 13 fatalities this year alone—including falls, crush injuries, collisions, and explosions. Over the past five years (2018–2022), a total of 55 workers have lost their lives in shipbuilding-related incidents.

Shipbuilding environments involve numerous hazardous tasks and complex workflows, with many subcontractors working simultaneously—making them highly prone to serious accidents. The shortage of skilled labor only adds to the challenge. In response to recent major incidents at small- and mid-sized shipyards, the Korean government has announced plans to focus its safety oversight efforts—including training sessions, field inspections, and roundtable discussions—on these smaller shipbuilding firms.

In such environments, where vast workspaces, complex procedures, constantly moving heavy equipment, and other diverse hazards coexist, traditional safety management practices that rely heavily on human supervision are reaching their limit. It’s time for shipyards to consider safety management solutions that can meet the demands of modern safety regulations.

5 Key Safety Challenges in Shipyard Operations

1. Limited Monitoring Capabilities Due to Large Work Areas and Complex Processes

Shipyards span tens of thousands of square meters, where a wide range of tasks occur simultaneously across multiple zones. With only a limited number of safety personnel available, it is physically impossible to monitor all work areas in real time. The risk of accidents is especially high in blind spots—such as the interior of large vessels or during night shifts—where visibility and oversight are limited.

2. Routine High-Risk Tasks That Can Lead to Major Accidents

Work at height, confined space operations, welding, and cutting are everyday occurrences in shipbuilding. Even a minor error or failure to follow safety protocols in these high-risk tasks can lead to serious accidents. This makes it essential to continuously monitor whether safety gear is being worn and whether proper procedures are being followed in real time.

3. Difficulty Maintaining Safe Distances Between Heavy Machinery and Workers

In shipyards, large equipment such as cranes, transport vehicles, and forklifts operate continuously. Ensuring a safe distance between machines and workers is a matter of life and death. However, due to constant noise and deep task concentration, workers often fail to notice nearby hazards.

4. Challenges in Managing Fire and Explosion Hazards

Shipyards are environments where welding, cutting, and coating take place regularly, all of which carry inherent risks of fire and explosion. Fires that occur in confined spaces—such as inside ship hulls—are particularly dangerous, as they are difficult to detect early and can spread rapidly, resulting in large-scale incidents.

5. Difficulty Securing Evidence for Safety Law Compliance

Under current safety laws, business owners and executive officers are held accountable for implementing and maintaining workplace safety. As a result, documenting and preserving proof of safety management activities has become essential. However, in practice, it’s extremely difficult to record every safety activity occurring across such a large and complex worksite.

AI Video Analytics Designed for Shipyards

Superb AI’s Video Analytics offers a safety management system tailored to the unique needs of shipyard environments. It integrates seamlessly with existing CCTV systems and provides real-time alerts and response capabilities in the event of abnormal situations.

In fact, a major Korean shipbuilding company recently approached Superb AI to enhance its worker safety monitoring system. One of the biggest challenges in building such a system was the lack of real-world hazard data. Actual accidents must be avoided at all costs, while staging and filming accident scenarios required significant time and resources. The company also needed data that covered a wide range of work environments and scenarios. According to the head of the company’s AI development team, Superb’s data generation capabilities provided “the perfect solution to the challenge we were facing,” and significantly improved the system’s real-world hazard detection capabilities.

Here are 4 key technologies that set Superb AI’s Video Analytics apart in transforming safety management in shipyards:

1. AI That Detects Anything: Real-Time Recognition of Shipyard-Specific Hazards

Limitations of Traditional Video Monitoring:

• Can only detect a limited range of pretrained hazards; difficult to gather rare hazard data
• Requires 3–6 months of retraining to recognize new hazard types
• Detection accuracy drops in complex shipyard environments

What Sets Superb VA Apart:

• Instantly detects a wide range of risks using a vision foundation model
  • Recognizes shipyard-specific hazards such as “workers approaching a moving block” or “Flammable materials in proximity to active welding zones”
  • Detects complex scenarios like “unauthorized worker entry into crane operation zones” or “working alone in confined spaces”
• Can define and detect new risks instantly, even when work conditions change
  • Provides synthetic hazard data through Superb Platform’s data generation capabilities when real data is unavailable
• Maintains high detection accuracy even in challenging lighting and structural conditions unique to shipyards

2. Natural Language Video Search: Efficient Management and Analysis of Vast Worksites

Limitations of Traditional Video Monitoring:

• Takes 1-2 days in average to manually review all footage for root cause analysis
• Limited search capabilities such as keyword- or timestamp-based search make it difficult to find exact scenes
• Lacks structured data for analyzing incident patterns or developing preventive strategies

What Sets Superb VA Apart:

• Intuitive video search using natural language
  • Enables immediate search queries like “show me workers without helmets in Block A yesterday”
  • Supports complex condition queries such as “find all cases of unsecured harnesses during height work last week”
  • Detects and retrieves specific risk patterns like “unauthorized entry into crane zones”
• Automatically records all hazardous events as they occur
  • Automatically generates captions for major events for scene description
  • Quickly searches events based on text descriptions, offering more details for future review

3. Spatial Intelligence: Complete Visibility into the Entire Shipyard

Limitations of Traditional Video Monitoring:

• Difficult to monitor large-scale shipyards using traditional surveillance systems based on 2D floor plans
• Inaccurate location tracking in complex structures such as inside large vessels
• Time-consuming and costly to reconfigure monitoring systems when layouts or work zones change

What Sets Superb VA Apart:

• Automatically generates 3D shipyard layouts using existing equipment or smartphone footage
  • Matches existing 2D/RGB CCTV cameras with complex site layouts to provide complete spatial awareness
  • Creates precise 3D spatial models from smartphone video—no need for LiDAR or specialized equipment
  • Accurately visualizes and maps complex environments like the interior of large vessels
• Tracks real-time locations of workers and equipment to proactively prevent collisions
• Analyzes spatial data to automatically identify high-risk areas

4. AI Assistant: Your Smart Safety Management Partner That Communicates in Natural Language

Limitations of Traditional Video Monitoring:

• Poor usability due to complex user interfaces
• Requires expert personnel to analyze safety management data
• Time-consuming process for generating reports and statistical analyses

What Sets Superb VA Apart:

• Conversational AI assistant that responds to natural language queries
  • Instantly answers questions like “What are the peak hours for helmet violations in Area A this month?”
  • Handles advanced analysis requests such as “Analyze changes in early risk signs compared to last quarter”
  • Automates report generation for tasks like “Create a report for tomorrow’s safety inspection meeting”
• Provides data-driven insights for proactive safety management
• Automatically generates and stores documentation to support compliance with safety regulations

Future-Proofing Shipyard Safety Amid Rising Regulatory Pressure

As global safety regulations continue to tighten, shipyards are under growing pressure to adopt a more systematic and evidence-based approach to safety management. Superb AI’s Video Analytics is a strategic tool designed to meet these evolving compliance demands while significantly improving operational efficiency.

1. Identifying and Addressing Hazards in Advance

Stricter regulations require employers to proactively detect and mitigate workplace hazards. Superb AI’s AI-powered risk detection system identifies risks in real time and uses spatial intelligence to analyze hazardous zones and behavioral patterns—enabling preemptive corrective action.

2. Providing Proof of Safety Education and Management

Demonstrating compliance is just as important as fulfilling safety responsibilities. With Superb AI, all safety-related activity is automatically analyzed, documented and stored, providing detailed, objective records that serve as verifiable proof of compliance.

3. Ensuring Swift Response and Thorough Analysis of Incidents

Fast response and root cause analysis are critical for minimizing liability when accidents occur. Superb AI enables immediate action through real-time alerts and natural language video search, allowing teams to respond faster and investigate more effectively.

4. Adapting to Constantly Changing Work Environments

Shipyards are highly dynamic, with conditions that evolve daily. Superb AI’s spatial intelligence and vision foundation model provide the flexibility needed to keep safety systems current—no matter how quickly the environment changes.

Building the Future of Shipyard Safety—With Superb AI

The challenges of shipyard safety can no longer be addressed with traditional approaches alone. With stricter regulations and rising legal risks, the industry needs innovative tools that mitigate legal exposure, protect worker safety, and enhance productivity.

Superb AI’s Video Analytics solution is built to meet this challenge. Our AI’s ability to detect anything, search video with natural language, generate 3D spatial intelligence, and support natural language interaction through AI agents makes it uniquely suited for shipyard environments. This isn’t just a technological upgrade—it’s a cultural shift in how shipyard safety is approached.

Stricter regulations may introduce new risks, but they also present an opportunity to build a smarter, sustainable industrial future—if we can drive a true paradigm shift in safety through cutting-edge technology. Superb AI is ready to lead that transformation—together with you.