Nebula Public Library

This activity developed high-performance data compression software with embedded data analysis features for radio-frequency, multi-band images and video. It offers excellent compression ratios and quality levels with very small computing requirements, which even allow for real-time operation on modest processors. Tests on data from ESA's OPS-SAT satellite reveal image ratios over 1:10 with excellent visual quality, and radio-frequency ratios over 1:3 with nearly identical spectrograms thanks to a smart lossy approach.

‘STARCOP’ is an initiative to use machine learning and multiple satellites with diverse detection capabilities to quickly detect methane leaks and send notifications in near real-time. In this project Trillium Technologies developed machine learning models to automatically detect methane in hyperspectral and multispectral imagery. Their hyperspectral model (HyperSTARCOP) is able to capture more than 90% of plumes in test data while reducing the false positive rate by 39% when compared to state-of-the-art models.

In the ocean, transport and mixing processes tend to disperse matter in suspension over wide spatial (~100 km) and long temporal (~month) scales. Fronts appear at the boundary between water masses with different properties and are caused by diverse oceanic features and processes, including bottom topography. Frontal structures include tidal mixing fronts, shelf-break fronts, upwelling fronts, estuarine fronts, plume fronts, fronts generated by convergence or divergence of water masses, and frontal eddies (Acha et al. 2015; Largier 1993).

The Ka-band frequency (35 GHz) is becoming increasingly attractive for spaceborne remote sensing applications. Unlike other radar bands, the Ka-band enables the development of compact high resolution interferometric instruments and embarking the payloads on a single platform. This creates unique new opportunities in Earth observation science and civil security applications, for instance in monitoring the changing cryosphere, generating high resolution maps of ocean currents and ship and vehicle detection.