The main ambition in Space and Security domain is to ensure the well being and security of societies and citizens by exploiting suitable space assets. Established this objective, experts in Earth Observation and imagery analysis work together at SatCen to ensure that the provided geospatial intelligence products and services comply with the highest quality level to support informed decision-making in the security domain.
An important value provided by Earth Observation datasets is the possibility to identify certain features or changes on the Earth’s surface at various spatial and temporal scales. Change Detection is a transversal technique supporting the monitoring of urban, built-up and natural environments by identifying relevant changes within areas of interest. This way, this Space and Security Innovation pilot focuses on supporting SatCen improvement of capabilities in three key areas:
- The design and development of Earth Observation processing algorithms to detect changes in pairs of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 images that help to characterize changes occurring on the Earth’s surface, maximizing the opportunities offered by these data sources
- The implementation of the algorithms with several degrees of automatization to allow the launch of the monitoring tasks and the automatic generation of the change maps, within a pre-defined or continuous period of time
- The assessment of the benefits of working in Cloud infrastructures to deploy, test and upscale Earth Observation processing services and to access and catalogue results
In short, the key challenge faced by the Space and Security Innovation pilot is to improve the capacity to access, process and analyse this huge amount of heterogeneous data to provide decision-makers with trustful, timely and useful information, what has been possible through NextGEOSS project. The pilot builds on the results of the activities performed by SatCen in the framework of two Horizon 2020 projects: BigDataEurope (Integrating Big Data, Software & Communities for Addressing Europe’s Societal Challenges) and EVER-EST (European Virtual Environment for Research – Earth Science Themes).