Maritime Signal Flags

Encode Maritime Signal Flags

Decode Maritime Signal Flags

Background

I keep finding these nautical flags (I supposed they’re really called maritime signal flags) all over, including in kids books. It feels like a hidden code that’s a little bit inaccessible. I wanted to create a simple app that would let me decode them.

Future Areas

I’d love to investigate how best to sort the flags together to make it easier to decode. My guess is that finding all the possible colors and then arranging the flags in those groupings could be pretty interesting. Should be pretty easy to build a histogram of the colors, smooth or select a peak, and then resample the colors to see if they contain those peeks.

“python - Plot image color histogram using matplotlib - Stack Overflow”. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12182891/plot-image-color-histogram-using-matplotlib. Accessed 02 Sep. 2022

Resources

“International maritime signal flags - Wikipedia”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_maritime_signal_flags. Accessed 02 Sep. 2022

“NATO phonetic alphabet - Wikipedia”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet. Accessed 02 Sep. 2022