Intelligent Sail Shape Processing
Overview
Sailors and sail designers rely on comparing the shape of a sail across different conditions and rig settings to tune performance — traditionally a slow, manual process involving reference marks and hand measurement from photos. Working with North Sails and Alive Industries, this project builds an AI-powered mobile app, SailScan, that automates this process directly from a phone camera.
The core problem: given a photo of a sail taken in the field, automatically detect the sail and extract accurate, consistent shape measurements — without markers, calibration rigs, or manual annotation — so sailors can scan a sail, instantly get its shape profile, and compare it against previous scans of the same sail under similar conditions.
The app uses on-device auto-scanning computer vision to detect the sail and derive its shape from a single photo, letting users track rig tune and performance development over time, with scans exportable and stored for later comparison.