‍The European Space Agency extends its collaboration with Dotphoton to ensure reliability and scalability of AI-based analysis for Earth Observation data

Contact: Marina Hramkova, marina.hramkova@dotphoton.com

Telephone number: +41 41 552 50 00

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Zug, Switzerland, December 2021

The European Space Agency extends its collaboration with Dotphoton to ensure reliability and scalability of AI-based analysis for Earth Observation data

Swiss start-up Dotphoton and the European Space Agency (ESA) have signed a second contract to continue the development of a metrologically correct image compression technology for space applications.

The purpose of the new contract is to further develop and extensively test Dotphoton's metrological compression technology for Earth observation image data. The final product is aimed at reducing costs in processing and storing raw image data by ESA in satellite-to-ground image transition, one of the vital cost drivers for all modern missions.

“The world is relying more and more on remote sensing satellite data, but those daily petabytes come at an extremely high cost. This is accelerating the paradigm shift from the traditional 'raw data delivery' to the more desirable 'information delivery'. Here is where Dotphoton’s technology combined with the unique knowledge of our payloads can achieve a major accomplishment: preserve the image quality of our data while attaining compression ratios only possible with high information loss in the past"

says Roberto Camarero, Onboard Payload Data Processing Engineer at ESA.

Dotphoton's metrologically correct compression combines the highest quality of lossless image formats with the flexibility and speed of lossy formats.

"Additionally to the obvious compression benefits, Dotphoton helps to prepare the big Earth data for AI-based image processing. We are happy to continue our collaboration with ESA that will enable reliable, scalable and data-centric AI for the Earth Observation data"

continues Eugenia Balysheva, CEO of Dotphoton.

Dotphoton continues to work with ESA under GSTP (General Support Technology Programme), the signed contract will bring Dotphoton's technology to the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 5.

About

Dotphoton

Dotphoton is a Swiss-based technology company that provides innovative image data management solutions for large image data. Dotphoton’s meteorologically correct approach to image compression enables file size reduction by a factor of 6-10 while preserving the raw quality of images and improves the experience of managing large data sets.

European Space Agency

The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe's gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe's space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world. ESA is an international organisation with 22 Member States. By coordinating the financial and intellectual resources of its members, it can undertake programmes and activities far beyond the scope of any single European country.

ESA’s General Support Technology Programme

The development of technology – making new things to do new things – is central to ESA's existence. The Agency spends around 8% of its budget on direct research and development, through a variety of programmes covering various different inventions, each leading activities based on their technical maturity or their field. GSTP, the General Support Technology Programme, is an optional programme that every single one of ESA’s participating states chooses to support. It takes previously proven innovations through to succeeding stages of engineering, finally evolving fully-tested hardware ready for adoption by future missions.