Vancouver’s Metaspectral has been selected to join the SCALE Aerospace Accelerator Program.
Run by the Starburst Aerospace Accelerator in collaboration with UCLA, SCALE is an early-stage, aerospace-focused accelerator that helps entrepreneurs launch and scale their businesses.
Metaspectral’s unique technology derives real-time insights from artificial intelligence (AI) using ultra-high-resolution, visible-to-infrared (hyperspectral) images.
This is enabled by its unique, lossless compression capabilities, which can reduce file size to as little as 30% of their original size without losing key data, and to as little as 9% of its original size with near-lossless compression.
This is a breakthrough because, following NASA’s Artemis program, which the Canadian Space Agency was involved with, a wave of space missions has emerged. These have one major challenge: they’ll only have an 8-hour connectivity window per week to transmit data back down to earth.
There is a blatant disconnect between the quality (i.e. resolution) of the sensors that are being launched and the amount of bandwidth available.
Metaspectral addresses this problem. Not only by reducing the size of the data that needs to be transmitted to Earth, but also facilitating more edge-processing of data using machine learning.
There are also many satellite constellations planned to be launched that will cost millions of dollars per year in data transmission alone once fully scaled. Metaspectral promises to cut those costs by at least 50%.
“Hyperspectral imaging is ideal for use in space. The technology collects and processes information from across the electromagnetic spectrum, creating ultra-high definition images that are useful for a variety of applications including Moon exploration and Mars missions, as well as for monitoring forests, weather, and oceans on Earth,” said Francis Doumet, CEO of Metaspectral.
“A key challenge in space is that computing resources on board are constrained, so the images must either have their quality degraded to have the data transmitted to Earth, or be analyzed with much of the data truncated.”
Originally named Compression.ai, Metaspectral was founded by Francis Doumet and Migel Tissera in 2019.
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