The RapidAI4EO projects brings together Planet Labs, the operator of the world’s largest fleet of Earth-imaging satellites, Vito, the main production center of the Copernicus Global Land Service, Vision Impulse, a recent spin-off of German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and Serco Italia, a worldwide service provider to governments, international agencies and industries, and operator of the ONDA DIAS platform.
Each of the RapidAI4EO partners is the leader in their respective fields
Planet Labs GmbH (Planet), located in Berlin, is a vertically integrated aerospace and data analytics company that operates the world’s largest fleet of Earth-imaging satellites. Founded in 2010 by three NASA scientists, Planet is driven by a mission to image the entire Earth every day, and make global change visible, accessible, and actionable. Planet has designed and built over 300 satellites, with approximately 150 satellites currently operating across three distinct constellations – including the largest sub-meter constellation in the world.
Role
Planet has created a new data source that is highly complementary and well aligned with the Copernicus EO missions, by providing global daily revisits of the entire landmass of the Earth at 3m and with spectral coverage that matches Sentinel-2 in the VNIR range of the spectrum.
VITO, the Flemish institute for technological research, provides high level services, multi-disciplinary assistance and applied research in the fields of environment, energy and materials. Elaborating on the large societal challenges of today, VITO provides innovative and high-quality solutions, whereby large and small companies can gain a competitive advantage, and advises industry and governments on determining their policy for the future.
Role
VITO leads the production of the Copernicus Global Land Service and as such they bring an intimate knowledge of CLMS and best practices in the production of LULC products. They are uniquely positioned to evaluate the benefits of Planet’s new data source and its insertion into the current Copernicus production chain.
Vision Impulse (VI) is a spin-off company of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) – the largest research center for Artificial Intelligence in the world and one of the two European NVIDIA AI Labs. Vision Impulse is based in Kaiserslautern, Germany and was funded by experienced researchers of the DFKI institute specializing in the analysis of satellite and aerial imagery with machine learning and computer vision approaches.
Role
As the creator of the recently released machine learning dataset EuroSAT, Vision Impulse brings its first-hand expertise in creating corpora for large-scale EO studies and contributes with its extensive expertise in the development of machine learning models in the EO domain.
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is a non-governmental, non-profit, international scientific research institute that conducts policy-oriented research into problems too large or complex to be solved by a single country or academic discipline, or of common concern to many countries that require national and international cooperative action. IIASA is well known for its crowdsourcing based data collection and global validation effort. IIASA has a lot of expertise in developing tools for spatial data visualization and user communication, as well as developing independent reference datasets, and spatial accuracy assessment.
Role
IIASA brings critical expertise in the area of ground truth and validation and they are also embedded in the CLMS production chain.
Serco Italia S.p.A. is part of Serco Europe (of Serco Group), a trusted partner of European governments, institutions and International Organizations, delivering public services and employing 1000+ people across nine countries. The company has been operating in Space for the past 30 years, providing highly specialized services for public agencies and organizations, namely, the European Space Agency (ESA), the Italian Space Agency (ASI), the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the European Environment Agency (EEA), CERN and many other public institutions. The company offers operational and engineering support with core competences in IT systems and Data exploitation in various thematic areas (agriculture, atmosphere, cartography, disaster management, geology…).
Role
Serco Italia leads the ONDA consortium selected to provide the Copernicus Data and Information Access Service (DIAS) on which the overall proof of concept will be deployed.
