Archives: Activities Portfolio

Objectives of the Product

The HyperScout® 2 leverages the HyperScout 1 hyperspectral imager platform complementing it with thermal imaging and Artificial Intelligence capabilities in a unique compact package, suitable for deployment on small and larger satellites.

HyperScout enables science missions from small platforms. It is an affordable hyperspectral and thermal imager that enables smart services for its commercial customers, with a quick turnaround between order and delivery.

The first mission which will benefit from the HyperScout® 2 measurements is the FSSCat, an innovative mission concept consisting of two federated 6U Cubesats in support of the Copernicus Land and Marine Environment services. A dual microwave payload and HyperScout® 2 will be used to measure soil moisture, ice extent, and ice thickness, and to detect melting ponds over ice.

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Customers and their Needs

HyperScout is serving the Earth observation and Planetary Science markets. Both markets rely on direct sales to customers, which operate constellations and take care of the full infrastructure. Or through the sales to platform providers, which will sell to the final customers the turn key solution.

The system integrators supplying or operating constellations of small satellites need affordable hyperspectral imagers to enable smart services and quick turnaround between order and delivery.

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Targeted customer/users countries

International.

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Product description

HyperScout® 2 is the product enhancement of HyperScout, a miniaturised hyperspectral imager developed with ESA TEC/MMO. The enhancement addresses both the spectral range and the processing capabilities. The spectral range is increased with the integration of an additional spectral channel in the Thermal Infrared range. The processing capability with the integration of a Vision Processing Unit is tailored for Artificial Intelligence applications.

The imagers are based on 2D sensors used in push broom mode (VNIR and TIR channels). They are designed to be operated upon nano, micro and larger satellites. The extremely compact reflective telescope ensures high optical quality, and the telescope is an athermal system based on a monolithical structure. The VNIR Focal Plane Array (FPA) is based on CMOS sensor and a multispectral bandpass filtering element used to separate the different wavelengths. The TIR FPA is based on a microbolometer and a multispectral filtering element.

The Instrument Control Unit (ICU) presents the contact point for the HyperScout® allowing in-flight debugging and powering each component. The Back-End Electronics (BEE) is the electrical interface to the spacecraft and is latch-up protected. It distributes power, clocks, telemetry and commands between the units, controls the detector and serves as the data and control interface. The On Board Data Handling (OBDH) serves multiple purposes, the most distinct being the platform for both the acquisition and the processing modes. It can run algorithms for data processing (L0 to L2A-L2B). Both the acquired L0 image data and processed data are stored on board the payload’s MMUs.

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Added Value

HyperScout® 2 is a miniaturised hyperspectral and thermal imager with on-board intelligence enabling commercial and operational small satellite missions.

The hosting satellite can be as small as 3 litres and a weight a few kilograms, resulting in a considerable cost saving compared to an infrastructure based on larger platforms.

The market of hyperspectral imagers is consolidating. Examples of hyperspectral imagers on orbit or under development in Europe are the Italian PRISMA and the German EnMap. They have similar spectral performance as HyperScout but broader spectral range, better spatial sampling and smaller swaths on ground – hence smaller revisit possibility. Their mass is of the order of hundreds kilograms therefore are accommodated on satellites with a mass at launch of 500 to 1000 kg. Earlier stage initiatives can be found in Belgium, hyperspectral instruments commercially viable are under design and considered to be built. Other hyperspectral service initiatives can be found in in South America, however being based on a service model, it is not in competition with the HyperScout sales model.

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Current status

The activity is now completed. HyperScout® 2 has performed successful operations in 2020 acquiring spectral datasets that have been processed providing spectral reflectance at top of atmosphere in 50 spectral bands confirming the expected performance of the payload. Additionally Artificial Intelligence algorithms have been run on the HyperScout platform showing the ability of creating cloud masking with a very good accuracy and with zero false positives.

Objectives of the Product

Increasing drought issues impose a threat to farmers and food security worldwide. Therefore, irrigation is crucial to ensure high and stable yields. Reliable irrigation advice helps to improve food security, farmers’ income, and reduce the use of water. However, the problem with generating irrigation advice is that it demands a lot of input from the farmer like information on numerous soil and crop parameters. On top of that, the information required tends to deviate towards the end of the growing season. Each model has a niche, but no model works best for all crops in the different regions. Using in-situ soil moisture sensors faces many limitations, such as costs and the point-based nature of the observations.

Three Dutch tech partners have joined forces to support farmers in fighting drought problems by providing a state-of-the-art irrigation advice service, named the WAM. The WAM uses the best available climatic, soil and crop datasets required for a certain use. The model adjusts the input available, and uses EO data assimilation to ensure accurate advice. This product is available to any user in Europe who can add new datasets or parameters to ensure that WAM provides customised advice to any farmer.

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Customers and their Needs

The WAM product is targeted at arable farmers throughout Europe. The activity has started to identify the needs of farmers in The Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal to understand their regional diversity. Farmers have been interviewed, tested the product, and provided feedback on the prototypes. The accuracy of the output is also tested with historic as well as present data for different crops in the plots of existing customers.

Farmers are especially focused on accuracy, user friendliness and economics. If the product provides accurate and actionable insights on-the-fly, it is well received. The less user input required throughout the season, the better. WAM is especially focused on accuracy, as many are still sceptical about using satellite images to monitor sub-surface conditions.

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Targeted customer/users countries

Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, and eventually all of Europe

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Product description

WAM provides updated irrigation advice daily. This is based on VanderSat’s daily soil moisture maps at 100m resolution. Sensor combination and intelligent downscaling provide accurate plot-level information.

The crop-water-balance is a modular structure, in which the best available data is used under any circumstances. This ensures that our advice can be provided for almost any crop in most regions, while the output is still as detailed as possible. The product aims to be scalable to at least the European level in 2021, and globally by 2023. The WAM should provide clear economic and environmental benefits for farmers.

The products innovation lays in its ability to create soil moisture maps and custom-made hydrological models. Proven concepts are also used to form a good understanding of user requirements based on many years of experience. Crucial in this are speed, accuracy, intuitiveness, and transparency. All underlying processes, such as crop development, can be visualised by the farmers. This means the product can be used for irrigation advice and more general crop monitoring. All results are actionable, providing a clear and realistic schedule.

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Added Value

The WAM approach requires limited farmer input to provide accurate advice throughout the season. Models that exclude soil moisture observations tend to deviate towards the end of the season, that is generally the driest period in which accurate insights are most needed. Our option is more affordable than in-situ sensors which only provide information at certain locations and have a limited life-span. Other remote sensing models either require cloud-free images for a certain percentage of the season, or have a lower spatial and/or temporal accuracy.

WAM uses the best possible data for each user. Each component of the model is based on a stack ranking of underlying datasets. More datasets, such as local weather stations or in-situ sensors, can be added depending on availability. Ranking can be changed depending on validation with farmers’ demand.

The product models crop growth in a dynamic way based on climatic conditions. This is important as climatic variation can easily result in an advancement or delay of the ‘standard’ modelled crop development by a couple of weeks. VanderSat provides the best available soil moisture insights in both temporal and spatial dimensions, enabling WAM to provide accurate results for most crops in any requested region.

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Current status

The product development is completed. All datasets and connections are operational and feedback is available in a user interface. Firstly, we have tested the accuracy with historic datasets on plots for which there is an irrigation schedule. This activity has showed that the products advice schedule improves the schedule compared with what farmers have done in areas in which no restrictions were placed on the use of water. The test cases show promising results on the benefits it brings to farmer in terms of water use, yield quality and irrigation cost-savings. 

Secondly, the year 2021 was dedicated to a pilot year where the product was tested operationally with a group of farmers. During this pilot operational advice was given to the subscribed farmers and feedback was gathered in terms of the provided information and user experience. After the conducted pilot year a technical validation was executed to test the product with field data. The study shows that the modelled water availability is in line with in-situ sensor data.

The product design and user requirements are selected and improved based on farmer interviews and feedback during the pilot year. All required datasets (e.g. soil moisture, crop database and soil characteristics) are operational, and a custom hydrological model has been developed.

The WAM marketing campaign has started and includes creation of awareness on social media and showcasing the economic rationale among others.

Currently, final pilot cases are conducted in collaboration with major Dutch agribusinesses while we prepare for the soft launch. The soft launch of the WAM irrigation service is scheduled for mid-2022, with its first clients using the service in the growing season of 2022.

Objectives of the Product

Corporate environmental responsibility is increasingly being driven by EU legislation via requirements for water quality monitoring and reporting. This is particularly the case in areas of coastal construction and development, agriculture runoff and water treatment. Organisations such as port authorities, regulatory agencies and water agencies are responsible for maintaining and monitoring water quality in member states. TechWorks Marine provides a combination of lower-cost hardware (MiniBuoy). This hardware can be used to validate satellite water quality data in coastal and river regions, and a set of commercial services based on both the in situ and Earth observation (EO) data for water quality monitoring. This enables environmental monitoring activities on a large scale.

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Customers and their Needs

The customers targeted for CoastEO are environmental regulators, port authorities, construction and engineering companies, water companies and local authorities responsible for water quality. The market drivers are regulatory compliance and the development of smart cities and smart ports through the use of sensors, Internet of Things (IoT) and data platforms. TechWorks Marine is promoting this integrated approach of in situ information to commercial providers, many of which are stakeholders in this activity. The main challenge is that current water quality products marketed to the public and private sectors are generated using either in situ point source sampling, or non-validated EO information from multiple satellites.

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Targeted customer/users’ countries

Targeted customers are based across Europe.

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Product description

The product is a combination of a low-cost MiniBuoy platform and associated processing chains to provide in situ validated EO products to a broad range of coastal users. The CoastEO service is made available through TechWorks Marine’s CoastEye platform, which is the company’s proprietary data analytics platform, providing customers with access to data. It combines information from hardware deployed by TechWorks Marine and data analytics from CoastEye to provide validated information.

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Added Value

Current validation of satellite data is a very costly and onerous process primarily in the realm of high-end research activities. This product enables environmental monitoring activities on a large scale, bridging the gap between big and expensive buoy deployments for long periods, and freely available satellite data which can be difficult to process and interpret for non-experts. This is also a cost-effective approach as it reduces the need for manual onsite sampling while providing ongoing monitoring of a localised area. The in situ data can then be used to validate commercial satellite data. The CoastEye MiniBuoy has been designed in a modular architecture. This means that it is very simple to change the sensors being deployed for different applications, making it extremely versatile.

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Current status

From January 2020 to December 2021, TechWorks Marine have successfully upgraded and optimised the CoastEye MiniBuoy for use in estuary and coastal environments, and the company’s CoastEye platform has been upgraded to automatically download, process, and visualise satellite-derived turbidity (NTU), total suspended matter (TSM), and chlorophyll-a (chl-a) data from both the Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 missions. TechWorks Marine have developed relationships with a number of potential clients in Ireland to provide EO-based services in addition to our in situ data portfolio. 

Objectives of the Product

The consequences of levee failure are huge. Sea level rise, extreme weather such as hurricanes, storms and drought events around the world continue to lead to critical flood defence failures resulting in tragic losses of life and the devastation of large areas. Water managers, insurance companies, real estate development organizations and other (government) agencies responsible for water safety need cost effective tools to better manage levee failure risks. The traditional way of detection risks of levee failures is difficult, expensive, and covers only parts of water barriers at a certain point in time.

Especially for experts that have responsibilities for safety and prevention, Sat4Flood provides a service that indicates stress factors of levees based on the most actual satellite data that can be implemented anywhere in the world. Sat4Flood visualizes the risks of levee failure based on the most recent Earth observation satellite data. This development combines the innovative technologies of satellite high-resolution soil moisture data with InSAR deformation data and other Earth observation data sources. Sat4Flood indicates the flood risk based on levee failure mechanisms such as overtopping and saturation, and enables high quality, large area covering, cost effective, and frequent monitoring based on satellite Earth observation.

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Customers and their Needs

Targeted customers are water authorities (direct responsible organizations to manage and monitor levees), municipalities, cities and regions/counties (responsible for the safety of citizens), crisis management/relief organizations and insurance companies (important for them to understand the risks of levee failures), real estate development (in relation to the impact of levee failure on the value of an area), mining companies (monitoring of tailing dams), international organizations such as United Nations and World Bank and international engineering firms with focus on water and civil engineering (to extend their product portfolio).

Targeted customers who are responsible for water safety need cost effective tools to better manage levee failure risks. They are involved in the activity by indicating their user needs and participating in a proof of concept to test and pilot the service.

Levee monitoring is a global challenge. Geographically, Sat4Flood starts rollout in the Netherlands, then continue in Europe. For worldwide rollout, a network of engineering forms and IT companies is targeted.

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Targeted customer/users countries

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Product description

Sat4Flood is a levee risk monitoring service based on Earth observation data. The main building blocks are soil moisture data (from optical) and deformation data (from InSAR). The application combines these two main building blocks with other satellite data such as water levels and meteorological data, and then indicates and visualizes the flood risk based on levee failure mechanisms such as drought and saturation. A web portal enables effective dissemination of information and user-friendly interfacing with customers.

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Added Value

• Continuous and reliable monitoring of the levee of interest;
• Large area covering and frequent monitoring;
• Deployable anywhere on the globe without the need to visit the side physically
• Monitoring for emergencies as well as under normal circumstances;
• Easily adaptable to specific needs of the customer;
• Weight of risk factors tailored to the specific context of the levee interest and user needs;
• A cost-efficient way of monitoring the risks of levees; cost effective due to the smart usage of open satellite data;
• Detect trends by using historical data sets.

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Current status

In March 2021, the project was successfully concluded with a final review. The main objectives of the project were to develop Sat4Flood, demonstrate the service with users, and make the service commercially ready. All three objectives have been realized: The consortium has developed Sat4Flood and demonstrated the system with 3 organizations on 12 locations. There is a clear need to monitor levees and identify risks of levee failures. Sat4Flood uses existing Earth observing satellite systems, which  has huge advantages: cost efficiency due to the use of open access data, coverage of the whole levee, and acquisition of key information without the need to go physically to the levee. The product is commercially ready, which means that Sat4Flood can be incorporated into identified customer workflows. During the pilot-demonstrations we have learned how customers want to work with Sat4Flood and how Sat4Flood can be integrated into their workflows. Now, at the end of the activity, we have identified customers and market opportunities, developed an integrated service to monitor risk indicators of levees, and we have implemented pilot-demonstrations with (potential) customers and partners. Those elements enable us to further rollout and upscale the service.

Objectives of the Product

The objective of this activity is to develop a new concept where the Mission Planning function is offered as a service.

MPSSERV is conceived to be a product born as an evolution of the GMV’s commercial Mission Planning System product called Flexplan. Flexplan is a consolidated and stable product which currently supports both operational and scientific missions including: Earth observation, Interplanetary, Exploration, Telecom and Navigation missions and can additionally support the management of ground operations.

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Customers and their Needs

There are three distinct customer groups that could be interested in these kind of mission planning services:

• Satellite operators: they can use it to procure complete ground segments to different providers, but there is a trend in the market to procure multi-mission COTS and services to minimize procurement and operational cost and risk.
• Space Agencies: most of those have their own ground systems but they could be interested in subcontracting operations services.
• “New Space” players: they intend to develop very low cost systems and to have low risk developments and/or procurements. They are looking for technologies and capabilities mature enough to guarantee their purposes without any investment, and of course, without any risk in terms of functionalities or operations.

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Targeted customer/users countries

There are no restriction in terms of countries of the targeted users. However, European Union countries, GB, USA and Asia countries like Japan, India and South Korea are good candidates.

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Product description

MPSSERV product is based on the evolution of Flexplan product due to the following reasons:

• Flexplan is a consolidated product in the area of Mission Planning Systems
• Flexplan is currently deployed for different operators. Different operator’s means different concept of operations and different concept of operations implies that the degree of flexibility of the product to cope with future users is reached. Consequently, the product is well proven.
• Up to now, Flexplan has been used as a classic system that has been deployed in the proprietary infrastructure of the operator. For this kind of deployment, the current paradigm server-client with a client deployed in the user’s infrastructure has been considered acceptable.
• Flexplan currently offers a strong set of functionality for the generation of operational plans that can be used “as is” to be offered as a service. This set functionality constitutes the business layer of the product that basically is not modified as part of this proposal.
• Flexplan currently offers a good level of automation.

Three major evolutions of the system are necessary to offer the Flexplan functionalities as a service: the generalization of the existing services, the design and development of a new front-end graphic interface web based, and the full automation of the planning generation process.

The final objective is to simplify the interaction of the users with the product in terms of:

• No special hardware requirements in the client size. A browser running in any operative system is enough to operate the system
• Open API to access to the main functionalities that allows to develop a simple front-end to consume such services.

The figure below is a functional block diagram of the product as it currently is that identifies its main functional modules and external interfaces.

The main functional modules are described in the table below.

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Added Value

MPSSERV product offers the following features over the current Flexplan and other products similar:

• New API on the server side in order to publish services that can be available potential users.
• New front-end User Interface covering most of the Flexplan components that can be offered as a service. This new front-end must be web based (operated by using a web browser) as it is considered essential to offer Mission Planning functionality as a service.

The concept of offering the Mission Planning as service is depicted in the following figure. The service can go from placing an engineer in the operational environment at customer premises performing the operations up to assuming the full operations of the system by the contractor. Between these two concepts, it exists intermediate service concepts: from isolated MP functions, remote operation, monitoring, etc.
There is no other supplier in the market capable to offer the MPS as services and this concept could fill a market niche.

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Current status

The activity is currently in its initial stage and the Software Requirements are being defined.

Objectives of the Product

AFFRESCO addresses the provision of a high-data-rate (more than 100 Gbps) satellite optical transport network for linking future Earth observation (EO) satellite constellations, to give a low-latency path to distributed optical ground stations. It does this by integrating both the ground and space segment optical free space communication hardware and network layers.

AFFRESCO advances a satellite constellation SDN modem designed for real-time data transport, combined with ultra-lightweight and mass-producible optical inter-satellite and direct-to-Earth link terminal in preparation for an in-orbit demonstration.

In addition to the hardware and networking, AFFRESCO also critically addresses the concept of operations needed to deliver a reliable and commercial service level agreement for optical data transport.

The goal is to support the seamless transfer of data from the space segment to ground – data streaming – for increased access to high-resolution and low-latency EO data.

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Customers and their Needs

Future EO networks and constellations are looking for lower latency and reliable delivery of data to allow near-real-time actionable insights, in addition to the vast increase in data being collected by high-resolution and multi-spectral science instruments. Current instruments have to discard, or highly compress, most of the data collected due to the downlink bottleneck. This happens in a ground station network that is already at capacity with more than 40 000 EO satellite downlink passes per day, resulting in prohibitive costs for associated ground station services and driving up the costs of EO-based products and services. If the future of the EO market is for commoditised services and integrated applications, then a paradigm shift in efficiencies throughout the entire data chain is required.

AFFRESCO addresses future novel EO and telecom constellation dynamic topologies with inter-satellite links to enable continuous real-time access to an optical ground segment, with link fault-tolerant routing. This also increases the downlink time, enabling higher downlink time and ultimately throughput and reliability with fewer globally distributed optical ground stations. The additional benefit is optimising terrestrial transport for distributed storage in data centres.

The hardware to flexibly adapt to the customers’ needs and different topologies is designed to be software-definable, so it can adapt even after it is deployed to meet evolving service needs.

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Targeted customer/users’ countries

AFFRESCO covers the provision of service and hardware.

The space segment hardware is currently being developed for customers in both Europe and the USA.

The optical ground segment service is being rolled out in conjunction with our ground station operator partner which has the largest global ground station network.

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Product description

AFFRESCO has two key hardware components for the space segment end-user customers. That space segment hardware is developed to work with mBryonics’ optical ground station terminal.

The modem allows for intra- and inter-satellite network switching to grant the handover of multiple optical satellite terminals and enable real-time optical transport networking of constellations for low-latency data transfer.

The fibre-coupled optical terminal uses a low-mass gimbal for course mechanical beam steering with a field of view for different satellite network topologies, including low-elevation optical downlinks. The fibre coupling allows the use of fibre-coupled photonics, enabling multiplexing for scalable data channels to be added as needed by the end user.

The image above shows the product/system architecture on a high level, highlighting the main system building blocks.

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Added Value

Particularly for EO, augmenting ground station visibility with inter-satellite links dramatically increases throughput and enables real-time data access. This also allows for improved link reliability with dynamic optical transport routing, traffic coordination, and orchestration. This leads to reduced ground segment infrastructure CAPEX and reduced terrestrial long-haul OPEX by routing data to the ground station closest to the data centre.

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Current status

AFFRESCO officially kicked off in 2019 and is rapidly advancing years of research and pre-development work in preparation for an in orbit demonstration.

Objectives of the Product

Marine insurers and reinsurers have a growing need to better monitor and assess risk accumulations. Skytek currently operates the REACT platform. This software offers a service that provides estimates of marine hull risk accumulations based on vessel traffic information provided by S-AIS/AIS technologies.

Processing power is growing nowadays, image analysis and object detection techniques are rapidly improving, and high-resolution satellite data and aerial imagery availability and coverage are also increasing. That is why it has become feasible to provide improved data intelligence for marine insurance and reinsurance organisations that are based on Earth observation (EO) data.

The activity extended the existing risk picture by using satellite data and modern image analysis combined with machine learning techniques. The result supports analysis of risk accumulation of cargo within ports which can range from both containers stored portside, through to car storage terminals combined with cargo on board vessels currently docked at ports worldwide. The solution supports seamless tasking of high-resolution commercial EO satellites combined with open sources such as Sentinel 2 to provide the underlying images, which are then analysed to extract intelligence regarding cargo accumulation and made available to end users as an ongoing service.

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Customers and their Needs

This product targets insurance, reinsurance and brokers organisations that deal with marine insurance. To support the marketing and distribution of this product, Skytek has signed a partnership with Aon, one of the biggest global insurers.

Through Aon, a new consultancy service based on Skytek’s REACT system expanded with the capabilities of this CPA project. This service now allows insurers and reinsurers to visualise the precise location of their insured risks alongside crucial vessel and cargo accumulation and risk information. Aon’s experts work closely with the insurers and reinsurers to analyse the potential accumulations and make specific recommendations to their portfolio for efficient reinsurance programmes and underwriting insights.

One of the primary concerns for the marine insurance industry is monitoring the risk accumulations in ports. Ports steadily increasing their throughput and growing cargo vessel capacities have a big impact on risk accumulation. The increasing risk of climate/weather-induced catastrophic events also compounds this problem.

Through their global networks of clients, Aon is actively promoting and introducing the concept and platform of Cargo Port Analysis using EO and GNSS.

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Targeted customer/users’ countries

The product targets insurance and reinsurance companies globally. Using this platform is now more important than ever for the insurance industry, with an ever-increasing throughput of cargo and containers in ports worldwide as well as an increased severity of storms and weather patterns due to climate change. Providing a near-real-time insight into cargo exposures and risks at major ports worldwide, on an ongoing basis and post-catastrophe, allows insurance organisations to better plan and quickly understand potential liabilities.

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Product description

The system provides a web-accessible and external API cloud-based SAAS platform. Information on potential port or fleet liability can be provided in near real-time based on past vessel history, vessels attending a specific port terminal, their expected cargo loads, and quantity as well as value combined with on-port cargo value analytics. This functionality is achieved through data-fusion of multiple data sources into common unified models, to create a large set of mineable geospatial data presented in a user-friendly multi-aspect HTML interface.

The new CPA component, deployed as a new component within the REACT platform uses a combination of the latest Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, EO, GNSS technology and big data analytics techniques, which are used to provide a cargo port analysis solution directly relevant to marine insurance and reinsurance organisations. The system integrates the tasking of satellites to take frequent high-resolution imagery, at over 200 major port locations worldwide, in which the majority of cargo worldwide passes through.

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Added Value

The insurance companies base their decisions on models, known as Catastrophe or CAT models, which are currently provided by a few specialist companies. None of these models and modelling software currently use satellite EO data as a source of information. The models are very high-level in nature and usually provide a large margin of error in the risk exposure calculations for cargo within a port.

By using EO and GNSS, Cargo Port Analysis brings added value by providing a far more accurate risk exposure picture. Instead of using a generalised CAT model, the real status of a port is analysed on current levels of cargo both onshore and in docked vessels. Cargo can range from standard containers to reefers (refrigerated containers) and vehicles stored port side. The underlying information allowing for this analysis to be performed is sourced using EO satellite and aerial imagery and automatic image analysis and information extraction. This approach leads to a fully automated risk exposure calculation solution that can be used for the major cargo ports worldwide.

The amount of available high-resolution satellite and aerial imagery is growing, and the global coverage is constantly improving, which further enhances the CPA solution in terms of quality and temporal availability. This creates a stable competitive advantage that is grounded in Skytek’s high level of competency and experience in processing and analysing satellite imagery.

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Current status

The activity kicked off in June 2019 and was planned in two major phases: the rapid prototyping phase aiming to frontload research and proof of concept work, in particular in relation to application of ML/DL to EO images and confirm to the project stakeholders the capability of envisioned technology and secondly the integration phase with the goal of delivering production grade software and integrating the solution in the wider context of the REACT platform.

The prototype of technical solution was successfully delivered at the Critical Design Review milestone in October 2020. The integration phase then followed, and the product was successfully integrated with the existing platform and brought to production level at the Commercial Acceptance Review milestone in May 2021. The product was successfully trialed and demonstrated to a range of end user clients within both the insurance, reinsurance and broker industries and the final presentation was successfully held in December 2021.

Throughout the whole project Skytek led an intense marketing campaign with the support of the major insurance industrial partner Aon. The REACT platform was presented to many insurance and reinsurance companies in Europe, USA and Japan and generated substantial interest and engagement followed by initial sales. The intense marketing campaign of the REACT platform with the InCubed CPA solution provided for the establishment of a strong presence in insurance industry. The newly developed concept had a big role in grabbing the attention of the insurance companies as something that has not been done before and that could be a source of competitive advantage through better risk modelling and improved claims processing. During the time of the project Skytek managed to sign first sales contracts for the system. The marketing campaign continues in 2022 with future sales agreements outlook positive.

Objectives of the Product

Earth Observation (EO) helps with the development and sustainability of businesses across many different sectors. The goal of this activity is to develop a platform for automated processing of EO imagery that helps clients identify cost-effective operational solutions, particularly when it comes to planning, maintaining and monitoring of their assets.

This activity aims to provide quality service using freely available satellite imagery, advanced analytics, up-to-date technology, and operational efficiencies by reducing costs. CGI SatSight achieves all of these functionalities with an emphasis on universality, extensibility, scalability and host-independent open source architecture.

CGI SatSight offers a scalable infrastructure, distributed processing and data independency, and fully automated algorithms for downloading and processing EO data. The product is cost-effective since there is no need to purchase and maintain specialised hardware or software. It also offers an innovative and flexible solution where the client can either directly integrate into existing systems or use as a stand-alone application. The client can also choose whether to run the whole processing chain on the cloud or on their premises.

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Customers and their Needs

Current methods for monitoring of vast infrastructures such as terrain and aerial controls are ineffective, time consuming and costly. They are also prone to mistakes caused by human factors. While there are some existing monitoring methodologies and systems, the majority are not universal to different analyses nor can they be fully tailored to clients’ needs. This presents an issue since every sector of interest has specific problems and some operators do not monitor their assets periodically nor continuously.

The CGI SatSight solution is ideal for clients that need to monitor vast areas of interest such as Oil & Gas, Energy and Utilities, Transport, Finance or Public sectors

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Targeted customer/users countries

The solution may be of use to clients worldwide.

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Product description

CGI SatSight is a solution for fully automated satellite image processing. The product chooses available data, downloads it, performs scalable processing and analysis, and then presents results through a notification to the user.

The technical functionalities of this product ensure clients from various sectors and industries can analyse the following use cases of this activity:

• flood detection,
• change detection,
• vertical land movement monitoring,
• cyclical vertical land movement monitoring.

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Added Value

The activity brings a complete and universal solution that offers a fully automated, scalable and distributed infrastructure. It also provides openness and universality for different types of analysis and plug-in architecture that reduces implementation and usability requirements.

In addition, the client can decide whether to integrate the platform into their existing systems or use it as a stand-alone application. The activity has also developed four initial use cases: analyses of flood detection, change detection and two for vertical land movement.

While the initial focus of the project was on Oil and Gas clients, the platform can be expanded into a wide range of businesses. As well as processing satellite imagery, the platform infrastructure can be used for a variety of space and non-space applications (e.g. image document and video processing) that require high computing power.

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Current status

The project is in its last quarter period. All customers’ and users’ needs were identified, verification and validation plans defined. The development of the technical platform and its web application has finished. Methodology and algorithmisation for all four use cases are done. The flood detection has been successfully implemented into the core of the platform.  

The following steps of the project will be devoted to implementing the land movement use case and the improvement of the web application to suit the interferometry character and maintain a good user experience. Potential customers are continuously interviewed, and new areas and further development for the solution are sought.

The basic part of the project was successfully completed. Whole platform and dedicated use cases were developed, tested and implemented. The frontend of the web application was highly improved to ensure smooth and comfortable user experience. Negotiations with potential customers are still ongoing, but even at the end of the project the platform was used for trial operation for some clients. The platform is open for new use cases according to clients’ needs

Objectives of the Product

The MicroSAR ground segment builds on the existing ground segment infrastructure at KSAT. This InCubed activity supports the development of new and innovative functionalities for real-time data take tasking using an upgraded KSAT Order Desk, communication between the ordering and the available satellite resources (“Mission Control”), access to the downlinked payload data from the SAR and AIS sensors, as well as a real-time SAR processor to feed the data and feed into the vessel detection and identification service chain.

The ground segment enables processing of downlinked data while the satellite downlink is ongoing. This includes direct stream of data, but optionally also to allow generation of traditional Level0 and Level1 products. The direct stream of data significantly decreases the time from the moment the downlink is done until a ship detection service is available for the end user. In order to support the direct streaming, new innovations have to be done both within the core SAR processing algorithms and its system design. The core SAR algorithms is designed to support the innovative new instrument behaviour that enables the high resolution and area coverage of the SAR instrument. This capacity, together with the global KSAT ground station network, provides the users with global information about vessels at sea in less than 30 minutes.

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Customers and their Needs

There is a strongly increasing global need for updated, reliable information about vessels, for applications including general safety at sea, but in particular for national sovereignty, illegal fishing, illegal immigration, smuggling etc. In this context, (near)real-time access to information about the vessels means much less than one hour after acquisition of data. The customers conclude subscription agreements for a systematic, long-term monitoring of their AOI’s. In addition, there is an increasing demand for short term/real-time tasking which has not been possible yet. The demand for information extends from getting the position, time and (AIS) identity of the vessels, onto details about the vessel category, size, speed and heading.

The output vessel detection information generated in the MicroSAR ground segment is addressing primarily main stakeholders in the institutional sector, e.g. including Norwegian government, other national governments and institutional users. These users have global interests, with an increasing focus on information about small(er) vessels and where the areas of interest may change very fast. Contract opportunities arise from both open tenders and confidential bi-lateral agreements with the provider. The success of the activity is measured in terms of vessel information sales to global customers. The activities following the development is self-standing and the success depends upon the result of sales and marketing in terms of number of customers.

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Targeted customer/users countries

The customer base is fully global.

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Product description

The baseline for the development of the MicroSAR ground segment is the existing KSAT ground segment, to be upgraded with the facilities and functionalities needed to handle the increased data downlink rates, data volume and customer requirements for access to the information. The rationale for the proposed architecture are:

• The ground segment is designed to make it possible to significantly improve system rapidity in terms of delays through the whole service production chain: tasking, data download, processing, detection and service delivery.
• To deliver the generated products very quickly after sensing, responding to market demand of a maximum 30 minute delay from image acquisition to detection service delivery. Notice that the vessel detection process is outside the scope of this activity

Delayed tasking and provision of data for information extraction is an important limitation on existing SAR missions. The Mission Control unit is the interface between the satellite and the order desk and provides information about what data takes might be possible. KSAT has an ordering tool developed by a European company that is further developed to include the new direct tasking opportunity. This develops both the actual providers competence on advanced mission planning, as well as KSAT operational competence.

The SAR processor is developed as a dedicated processor tailored for just this sensor and producing just the required output to feed into the vessel detection algorithms. The ground segment operates a SAR processor which can process the data (almost) as fast as the data is downlinked.

The ground station components all communicate using the EOSPS standard (the Earth observation extension OGC 10-135 to the OCG Sensor Planning Service OGC 09-000). A similar standard (OCG 06-141r6) is already used in some of the existing KSAT ground station components, so competence related to the practical use of such standards is already available in the activity. Available interfaces which do not use EOSPS (yet) communicate via (rather simple) proxies. This standard is used for planning and communicating about the sensing, down-linking and processing, not for defining formats used in the actual downlink, storage and processing.

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Added Value

Today KSAT’s access to EO data for the services utilization depends upon agreements with commercial satellite owners/operators. KSAT aims at being an independent service provider which is not biased to use own mission data. The MicroSAR mission fits into this operational strategy. KSAT has the data rights and performs the operations. This improves the competitive position even further as an independent global provider of (near)real-time multimission maritime information services.

The competitive operational edge with the mission and ground segment is the sensor dedication for vessels only and the fast data request take turn-around and information delivery time. The new system enables a strongly improved service offering the following features over the current service:

• Strongly Improved KSAT Vessel detection service using MicroSAR data through the MicroSAR ground Segment that enables maritime monitoring of the oceans of the world in a new way. Combination of high swath width and high resolution is enabling detection of small objects (small boats) in same acquisition/image.
• Tasking time could in best case be reduced to hours, compared to operational services where days and weeks is the standard for tasking time.
• Improved NRT service delivery. By using the entire KSAT ground network a maximum latency of 30 minutes between image acquisition and service delivery should be assured globally.
• Improved ordering and tasking process and data exchange enabling automated tasking by Order Desk/acquisition resources.

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Current status

• The system key drivers and requirements, and the overall system design documentation have been completed.
• The Ordering and Tasking system integration testing is on-going, even though it has not obtained the full functionality yet.
• The first release of the Savoir plug-in to be used for automatized mission data acquisition planning has been delivered and is being tested.
• The first release of the automated satellite control and mission planning system (DyST) has been installed at Sandbox.
• The first release of the MicroSAR Ground Segment Integrator Module has been provided and tested vs Savoir and DyST.
• A SAR processor pre-release annotated has been installed at the Sandbox, and tested on simulated data.
• The milestone review n 1 was successfully performed on 16^th January 2020.

Objectives of the Product

It is now possible to get information from images quickly after their acquisition, with imagery available in abundance. SignalEyes services provide Calls-to-Action for agri-business partners, managers of infrastructure or environment and mapmakers.

SignalEyes is a system that identifies object changes that customers are interested in, such as crop parcels, buildings, roads, water courses, solar panels and trees. Signal changes are varied and translated into tailored messages for customers such as:

• ‘’reserve mowing capacity in week x for 5 ha on parcel y’’ for biomass development in a pasture
• ‘’estimated volume of building annex is z m³, check building permit’’ for a new annex of a building.

The SignalEyes system consists of Object Based Signal Generators (OBSG), that are sets of ‘deep-learning’ algorithms monitoring the status of a particular object type on new images inserted into the SignalEyes system. Object knowledge and image characteristics together lead to Calls-to-Action that are specific to customers. The project is allowing OBSG’s to work together for neighbouring objects in order to increase their quality.

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Customers and their Needs

The SIG4EO technology in SignalEyes is being applied in 2020 for a variety of customers such as:

• Local governments managing large scale topographic maps (BGT) in The Netherlands receive mapping instructions for modified objects. When mapped, they are checked in SignalEyes.
• Gasunie, Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij (NAM) and other infrastructure managers receive alerts on spatial changes over or near the pipeline and other infrastructure that may form a risk to the assets.
• Engineering companies working on the modernisation of sewage systems, and preventing heavy rain flooding, use the continuously updated and very detailed Surface Sealing Map of the entire Netherlands.
• Provinces and nature protection agencies practice law enforcement on the cutting of trees by using information on the number and height of trees in the Boomregister.
• A variety of customers in The Netherlands and abroad receive information on the presence and area of solar panels, and rooftop potential. This service is now in execution for 14 metropolitan cities in Asia.
• Agencies paying/controlling agricultural subsidies in Europe and beyond for specific subsidies.

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Targeted customer/users countries

The Netherlands, Denmark, Kazakhstan, India, Tajikistan, etc.

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Product description

Satellite sensors are better suited to monitor changes on the surface of the Earth. Individual changes can be sold to interested parties when they are put in a language relevant to these parties and when they meet criteria such as price, timeliness and quality. The essence of SignalEyes’ innovation is that we have succeeded in meeting this criteria, with signals used in very different fields.

A SignalEyes signal refers to a number of database fields used to formulate the Call-to-Action of a user. The signal is also rich enough to contain the elements that enable the control such as whether the action has been executed and registered correctly.

Information provided on the API, its quality and the frequency as well as type of imagery used is all included in the Service Level Agreement with a customer. The change signalling in SignalEyes is a generic activity performed for objects for which customers have been identified/contracted.

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Added Value

The production of change signals may be generic, but the information each individual customer requires is specific. A generically produced change signal may not be worth the cost. However a value added information Call-to-Action that a customer can directly assimilate in their work process has a significantly higher value. This is why SignalEyes Callsto-Action are generated for each individual customer.

Of course, data for Calls-to-Action are based on a spatial change that is generated from many sources. However, there is little competition when the timeframe between the collection of a satellite image and the subsequent Calls–to-Action are in the order of a few days and has a completeness nearing 100%.

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Current status

The SIG4EO activity was completed in March 2020. The SignalEyes workflow assimilates the activity results during 2020 for all described objects.

With the completion of the SIG4EO activity, NEO starts the monitoring of all crop parcels, trees, water courses, buildings, roads and nature areas with at least four coverages of 50-cm VHR-images in 2020.

NEO is the first company on the planet able to monitor an entire country at this level of detail with this frequency and speed.