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.