Vancouver’s Metaspectral has been selected to proceed to the semifinals of the XPRIZE Wildfire competition.
XPRIZE Wildfire is a 4-year, $11 million competition incentivizing the innovation of firefighting technologies to mitigate destructive wildfires. The prize aims to transform current wildfire management approaches through the development of new technologies that can rapidly and accurately detect, characterize, and respond to wildfires before they become destructive.
Metaspectral, a remote sensing software company using deep learning and hyperspectral imagery to advance computer vision, is one of 20 teams that were selected to proceed to the semifinals of the competition.
As a semifinalist, Metaspectral was awarded $50,000 through the competition to continue to develop its technology.
Metaspectral is participating in the Space-based Detection and Intelligence Track of the competition, which demands solutions that can accurately detect new fires across landscapes as vast as countries within one minute.
Cofounder Francis Doumet is confident that his company is up to the task.
“Our technology uses hyperspectral imagery captured by satellites,” the chief executive officer explains. “Hyperspectral images include up to 300 unique spectral bands instead of the usual three that conventional cameras capture.”
This achieves “an extremely high level of detail,” Doumet says, “making it possible to detect wildfires earlier and with much higher accuracy.”
Such extreme levels of detail demands extreme volumes of data, however, which could be an issue when the speed of information moving around is mission-critical.
“Hyperspectral image capture produces gigabits per second of data, which requires significant computing resources for storage, analysis, and transmission,” admits cofounder Migel Tissera.
Tissera believes Metaspectral has solved this problem, however, through the company’s “proprietary, advanced data compression algorithms and machine learning.”
The firm’s in-house tech renders it possible to process, analyze, and transmit huge vats of data in real time without compromising the data quality, according to Tissera, who serves as chief technology officer.
Last year, the company was the only Canadian firm to be selected for the Venture Catalyst Space, a commercial space incubator located at the University of South Australia’s Innovation & Collaboration Centre in Adelaide. Before that, in 2021, Metaspectral participated in the SCALE Aerospace Accelerator Program, the same year it won a Canadian defence contract.
Over the years, Metaspectral has raised funding from a few sources, including investment from the Canadian Space Agency, a seed round led by SOMA Capital and Acequia Capital, and both provincial and federal funding.
Check out other initiatives leveraging modern technology to detect, analyze, and combat fire in B.C. and beyond.
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