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Telespazio UK, a subsidiary of Telespazio has been awarded a European Space Agency (ESA) contract to further develop a tool to automate quality assurance analysis of Satellite-based Earth Observation (EO) data products. The tool uses advanced machine learning techniques to automate processing of EO Products within a high-performance Cloud Computing environment. It will be made available as a Cloud-based service for New Space mission providers and Institutions.
The volume of EO data from satellites has increased by an order of magnitude in the last five years, due to modern satellites launched by New Space companies as well as governments and institutions. The total data generated is already on the petabyte scale, and it is not feasible to perform quality assurance of such data volumes with human interaction alone, or traditional image processing techniques.
The automated tool will seek to address this challenge of analyzing the huge volume of EO data products. The new activity, funded by ESA, will build on previous internal development activities. Overall, it seeks to strengthen Telespazio UK’s world leading capabilities in EO data quality assurance and to provide an easy-to-use service to commercial organisations and institutions.
Dr Patrick Griffiths, EO data engineer at ESA/ESRIN – and technical officer for the project – said: “Quality assurance is a critical step in the Earth Observation value chain. Yet with the drastically increasing volumes of acquired data, traditional approaches to quality assurance are no longer viable. This activity will explore how novel technologies, such as cloud processing and new machine learning approaches, can help making the process more efficient and ensuring that the best quality data products are delivered to the user community.”
Dr Geoff Busswell, Head of Sales at Telespazio UK, said: “We are excited to be applying innovative Artificial Intelligence technology to develop this tool. This new capability allows cost-effective provision of quality control services to our customers and allows them to continue provide leading-edge EO data and information products to their users.”
For more information visit telespazio.co.uk
