Articles

Toronto, August 2004: AUG Signals is pleased to announce that the company was selected by the Earth Sciences Sector (ESS) of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), in a competitive bid, as the prime contractor to perform a large hyperspectral survey in the southern region of Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada. The first phase of the program was initiated in July 2004.

AUG Signals, in association with Geotechnical Business Solutions (GBS) and with the support of the University of Alberta, and in consultation with the Geological Survey of Canada (part of ESS) will combine a diverse set of complementary resources in a powerful hyperspectral team. The contractual activities will benefit from AUG Signals’ extensive expertise in developing state-of-the-art proprietary hyperspectral techniques and successful webbased distributed processing systems and GBS’ proven experience in geological/mineralogical applications to be used for survey design and implementation. An end-to-end solution for geological mapping assisted by hyperspectral processing will be provided for improving the rate of discovery of mineral resources in the Arctic region.

This contract extends work performed under previous projects funded by the Canadian Space Agency Earth Observation Application Development Program (EOADP) and the GeoInnovations program of GeoConnections, a national partnership initiative led by Natural Resources Canada to build the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure. In addition, this contract will make use of advanced signal processing tools of AUG Signals that have been developed over the years under several Department of Defence projects sponsored by Defence Research & Development Canada (DRDC) Valcartier and Ottawa.

For more information, please contact Yifeng Li.

Toronto, September 2003: An Innovation Acceleration Centre (IAC) contract has been awarded to AUG Signals to increase the capabilities and applicability of the Image Fusion Centre available at www.signalfusion.com.The scope of this IAC project is to facilitate a multi-node Web-based distributed processing system for remote sensing applications through a new processing node built at Canada Centre for Remote Sensing (CCRS). The proposed work is dedicated to the selection and advancement of fusion techniques for further online implementation at www.signalfusion.com. An enhanced geospatial tool ready for online implementation that will be used on various data (e.g. hyperspectral, SAR) is the product anticipated to result at the end of this project.

Agricultural applications (precision farming, crop identification and mapping, yield estimation, productivity forecasting) and land mapping applications (land use/land cover change, estimating biomass, mapping forest degradation, urban planning and development) will be investigated. Agriculture supply companies, agronomists and individual farmers will be surprised by how little training they need to begin processing hyperspectral, multispectral or panchromatic imagery. Governmental agencies and insurance companies will be able to accurately monitor and assess the effects of natural disasters. To run AUG Signals’ powerful image fusion tool it is necessary only to have access to the World Wide Web for perusing data availability and eventually downloading images before processing the data through the online algorithms. The field observations could be interpreted in real time.

AUG Signals’ proposed study for vegetation/soil classification and for land survey applications could make a major difference in time-sensitive management and marketing decisions. The users will be able to detect online changes in satellite images, including those accessible via the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure being built by GeoConnections, a national partnership initiative led by NRCan. The IAC contract will be completed in July 2004.

Toronto, July 2003: A competitive contract has been awarded to A.U.G.Signals to expand its web-based image processing centre available at www.signalfusion.com with advanced change detection tools. To increase the level of integration between processing tools and data, the site will be able to interface directly with online imagery providers adopting the Web Mapping Server (WMS) standard. The site will also integrate a mirror node at the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing (CCRS), part of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan).

“The Government of Canada is proud to support this innovative project,” said the Honourable Herb Dhaliwal,Minister of Natural Resources Canada. “Funding through GeoConnections allows us to support this and other initiatives to build opportunities for Canadians, now and in the future.”

With the new service, users will be able to detect online changes in satellite images, including those accessible via the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure being built by GeoConnections, a national partnership initiative led by NRCan. The information gathered with the new change detection tools will assist in updating topographic databases, which is particularly important for land applications, disaster management, environmental monitoring and search and rescue. “The ability of any person to access and process geospatial information in almost real time at anytime and from anywhere is the heart of this project” said Dr. George Lampropoulos, the president of A.U.G. Signals. “This online tool promotes the innovation and competitiveness of the algorithms suppliers (Government, Industry, Universities) and, furthermore, increases the number of applications and the utilization of geospatial data. A.U.G. Signals is proud to develop this portal and make it a winning project for all Canadians”.

Awarded on behalf of the GeoInnovations program of the GeoConnections, this contract will be completed in May 2004.

A.U.G. Signals’ image processing centre already offers online automatic image registration, as well as image fusion capabilities. As part of the evaluation trial process, this service is FREE for a limited time.