Tracasa Global, public company of the Government of Navarre, in Spain, and member of the European Association of Remote Sensing Companies (EARSC) since 2024, is having a major impact in one project of the European 2024 Defence Fund call.
Recently, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for the Defence Industry and Space has selected a consortium coordinated by the Tracasa corporate environment, made up of 13 entities from 9 different countries. The consortium, with the name of Argos, will receive 5 million euros in funding and will carry out its work over the next 4 years.
Argos has the aim to improve the defence capabilities of the European Union through the development of solutions based on Artificial Intelligence and satellite images, both optical and radar.
Specifically, Argos participates, together with three other consortia, in a technological challenge in which the groups of participants will have to design, develop and present AI models that solve specific challenges in the field of security and defense, using European assets at all times and contributing, ultimately, to the strengthening of the European Union’s operational autonomy.
Tracasa Global and Tracasa Instrumental, leaders in the processing of satellite images and in the development of solutions with Artificial Intelligence, will tackle different technological challenges until 2029, together with the rest of the entities included in the consortium, with the aim of responding to specific aspects of security and defense challenges, such as target analysis, monitoring, searches, mapping and damage assessment.
Together with Tracasa Instrumental and Tracasa Global, the following entities are part of Argos: Centrum Badan Kosmicznych (Poland), Cubert GMBH (Germany), Evenflow (Belgium), Gisat (Czech Republic), Gmatics (Italy), Indra Espacio (Spain), Joanneum Research (Austria), Metasensing (Netherlands), Planetek Hellas (Greece), Rina Consulting (Italy) and the Universita di Napoli Federico II (Italy).
The work of Tracasa Instrumental and Tracasa Global in the field of security and defense has as its most relevant precedent the IntSen2 project, also led by Tracasa Instrumental, with participation by Tracasa Global. This initiative, promoted by the European Commission, received 3.28 million euros in support from the European Defence Fund 2021, and laid the foundations for the creation of a strategic European security and monitoring service based on satellite images and Artificial Intelligence.
The project managed to develop a proactive strategic surveillance tool capable of continuous and automated monitoring of areas of interest (air and naval bases), based on AI technology and Sentinel 1 and 2 images. The tool generates a fully automated workflow and is designed to integrate with existing analytics platforms at intelligence services, thereby optimizing the detection and processing of critical information at the strategic level. To achieve its purpose, the project based the research and proposed solutions exclusively on European space assets, with the ultimate goal of supporting and strengthening the European Union’s operational autonomy in defence and security.
Among all the work carried out by Tracasa in the remote sensing field, of special note is all its activity linked to the European Commission’s Copernicus program, being present in most of the services developed, such as atmospheric monitoring, ground surveillance, security, and emergency management. In this area, work has been completed for the Joint Research Center in Ispra, the European Environment Agency, the Commission’s Directorate-General for the Environment, SATCEN, and ECMWF.
In this area Tracasa Global currently boasts its own R&D team specialized in advanced analytics and Artificial Intelligence applied to geospatial information (GeoAI), with extensive experience in image analytics. This team has managed to emerge, in collaboration with research centers and universities, as an international leader in the field of remote sensing: the super-resolution of optical data and radar, object segmentation, crop classification and LiDAR point cloud classification.