Toronto, February 2005: AUG Signals won a new contract under the Space Technologies Development Program – 2004 promoted by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The project will develop a comprehensive software toolbox for Automatic Registration of Temporal Hyperspectral and Polarimetric SAR images. This contract builds on advanced results obtained by the company in the automatic image registration area for the last two decades. Currently, AUG Signals has a successful commercial product for automatic multi sensor image registration that works under the company’s Electro-optical Remote Sensing Software (ERSS) in an IDL environment and is one of the key players in a U.S. Department of Defense multi-sensor image registration activity.

Work performed under previous projects funded by the National Research Council Canada, the Canadian Space Agency and Defence Research & Development Canada (DRDC) – Valcartier and Ottawa will be refined and incorporated in a unique toolbox with superior performance (sub-pixel accuracy, increased resolution and multiple choices in selecting the optimal registration tool for a given set of data). The implementation of the algorithms on the web, via the company’s interactive knowledge portal at www.signalfusion.com will also be investigated to create an active marketing vehicle for the Internet-enabled geo-processing user segment.

In association with the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing and Consultants TGIS, AUG Signals will enerate the 3-D models of the registered images. The project benefits from the support of Defence Research and Development – Ottawa and the University of Calgary to produce up-to-date, advanced software for various detection and classification tasks. Noranda/Falconbridge will contribute in the validation phase of the resulting automatic registration toolbox. Several military and commercial (e.g. natural resource management) applications will be investigated in an initial phase. The current development will be applicable to change detection distributed processing technologies developed by the company under a GeoInnovations activity and currently expanded to international projects.

A commercial product accompanied by user documentation and complete customer support will be delivered at the end of a 15-month development cycle. It is anticipated that AUG Signals’ toolbox will significantly enhance the applicability of RADARSAT-2 data and of hyperspectral imagery acquired during current and planned missions.

For more information, please contact Dr. Ting Liu.