Metaspectral Selected to join leading Australian Space Program

Metaspectral Selected to join leading Australian Space Program
by Staff Writers
Adelaide, Australia (SPX) Mar 23, 2023

Metaspectral, a remote sensing software company advancing computer vision using deep learning and hyperspectral imagery, is announcing that it has been selected to join Venture Catalyst Space.

Venture Catalyst Space is a leading commercial space accelerator and incubator program delivered by the University of South Australia's Innovation and Collaboration Centre (ICC) and is funded by the South Australia Space Innovation Fund. The program kicked off this month and runs until the end of August 2023. South Australia's space sector continues to grow rapidly and Adelaide is recognized as Australia's space capital.

"Our SaaS platform, Fusion, is ideal for real-time compression, transmission, and analysis of hyperspectral imagery from satellites," said Francis Doumet, CEO and co-founder of Metaspectral. "Hyperspectral imagery contains data from across the electromagnetic spectrum which, when analyzed with artificial intelligence (AI), can be used to monitor time-sensitive environmental events on Earth such as wildfires, methane leaks, and more. The same data can also be leveraged by the defence industry for real-time intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance."

The Australian Space Agency opened its headquarters in February 2020 in Adelaide, and it was announced in 2022 that Kanyini, the first satellite designed and constructed in South Australia is set to launch this year. Kanyini will include a hyperspectral imaging payload, and will be managed and operated by the SmartSat Cooperative Research Centre (CRC).

"Australia is at an exciting juncture in its commercial space journey," said Migel Tissera, CTO and co-founder of Metaspectral, who earned both his Ph.D. and Bachelor's degrees from the University of South Australia. "Australia is not only a place that is very dear to me, but also a place where I would like to see Metaspectral expand our operations. I believe that we can bring significant value to the nascent local commercial space market with the years of research behind our space-ready technology. Especially with Kanyini including a hyperspectral payload, there is potential for our software to immediately provide value and be used by SmartSat CRC for managing, distributing, and analyzing the data."

Metaspectral Fusion is uniquely designed to handle the large data requirements of hyperspectral payloads. Its novel data compression algorithms allow the platform to transmit the data in real time without losing any quality, whether from orbit to ground or within terrestrial networks.

The technology is already planned for deployment on the International Space Station to demonstrate real-time compression, streaming, and analysis of hyperspectral data from Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and has also been funded by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to measure greenhouse gasses on the Earth's surface using satellite hyperspectral data.