Finnish hyperspectral satellite and AI-powered insights company, Kuva Space, has been awarded a €1.8 million contract to participate in the ESA’s CSS program. The program is designed to provide advanced hyperspectral situational awareness information for monitoring and mitigating civil security and crisis events.
Over the three-year R&D program, Kuva Space will test and develop onboard hyperspectral data processing, Sat-to-Sat, and Sat-to-IoT mobile communication. These capabilities will be demonstrated in a field study with the Finnish authorities, aimed at enhancing border surveillance by detecting and rediscovering illegal activities along the Baltic Sea area between Finland, Estonia, and Sweden.
The CSS program seeks to foster the use of spaceborne solutions to support humanitarian responses, law enforcement, safety, and emergency events swiftly, anywhere and anytime, for the benefit of everyone.
Jarkko Antila, CEO of Kuva Space stated: “Bringing information on any emergency events to first responders as quickly as possible has a huge environmental, humanitarian, and security impact. We look forward to collaboratively developing a robust solution to test the end-to-end delivery of insights to the user as part of the CSS program.”
The civil security domain currently faces various challenges, including limited resources, data access, big data handling, and data transmission challenges due to the growth in data volume, distribution velocity, data variety, and security. Especially before, during, and after emergencies, experts rely on disparate data sources and satellite assets to anticipate events, assess situations, and communicate, making actionable information in near real-time critical.
In response, five nations under ESA—Austria, Belgium, Finland, Portugal, and Switzerland—have contributed funding to create SMART-CONNECT, a consortium of various technology actors led by Austrian company Geoville. Participants in SMART-CONNECT include Kuva Space (FI), Epic Blue (BE), INOV (PT), Klepsydra (CH), neXat (BE), Sistema (AT), and VITO (BE). They aim to revolutionize crisis communication for swift data exchange and timely provision of actionable information in emergency situations.
SMART-CONNECT provides a middleware solution that ensures secure end-to-end data interconnectivity among citizens, first responders, disaster management centres, and situational awareness EO service providers. It features failsafe transmission capacity via automatic selection of available transmission channels (all SatCom and terrestrial). As a user-selectable service option, the solution offers an open value chain for third-party situational awareness information service providers, thereby providing an end-to-end data chain for civil-security emergency management.
Gordon Campbell, Head of Enterprise, within ESA’s Earth Observation Programmes Directorate said: “Hyperspectral data opens up a range of new and enhanced applications and services, particularly within the civil security domain. Kuva Space is one of the leading European companies developing hyperspectral systems, so it is very exciting that the company is a key member of the SMART-CONNECT consortium. The multi-platform constellation ensures fast revisit, along with the potential for extended persistence and fast tipping—or cueing—that allows for timely and relevant information to reach the hands of first responders when it is needed.”
Together with the Finnish authorities, Kuva Space will demonstrate the automatic detection of marine vessels using hyperspectral imaging and its advanced AI platform. An alert will be created if no Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) signal is detected from the vessel, raising suspicion of criminal activity. At this moment, Kuva Space collects and stores the spectral signatures of the vessel for rediscovery attempts and future acquisition.
Additionally, Kuva Space will develop calibrated and analytics data products onboard to automatically detect wildfires and landslide scarps, as well as provide their coordinates to civil security platforms within ten minutes of transmission to the ground station through SMART-CONNECT.
Kuva Space is on a mission to build the world’s most extensive hyperspectral satellite constellation and automatic AI-powered insights-as-a-service model. With three successful satellite missions, Kuva Space will launch two hyperspectral satellites and its initial services in 2024. The first one, Hyperfield-1, is scheduled to launch in July 2024. This will mark the initial stage of Kuva Space’s planned constellation, which aims to provide gapless monitoring by deploying up to 100 satellites by 2030.
