Larus Technologies Awarded LOOKNorth Contract
OTTAWA, ON, November 19, 2014 – Larus Technologies is pleased to announce it has been awarded a contract with LOOKNorth, a Canadian National Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research dedicated to remote sensing innovation, to provide maritime surveillance of vessel traffic to the National Space Centre in Ireland and the Irish Coast Guard in the North Atlantic (i.e. Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom – GIUK – Gap) providing access to the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Routes. This will be achieved by combining satellite-based Automatic Identification System (AIS) and satellite-based radar surveillance of an extended sea area with intelligent traffic analysis.
Larus Technologies will be providing its Total::Insight™ Decision Support System (DSS) to intelligently assess regional maritime traffic. Total::Insight™ is a real-time maritime anomaly detection engine which ingests AIS, radar and other types of data sources in order to automatically detect maritime anomalies as they occur. It uses a patented adaptive learning engine to continuously learn and perfect the information used to build the clearest possible maritime situational awareness picture. Included within Total::Insight™ are the Risk Management Framework (RMF) designed to extract risk features in real-time from various maritime assets in order to detect, well ahead of time, which vessels are more likely headed for distress in order to rapidly plan the optimal response (out of many possibilities), and the ISR Multi-Asset Optimizer allowing mission planners to rapidly generate a wide variety of optimized mission/collection plans for air, land and sea based search-and-rescue (SAR) assets. The optimizer was developed to ensure optimal use of response assets in order to meet critical mission objectives while at the same time fulfilling multiple and often challenging, mission constraints.
Total::Insight™ uses computational intelligence, advanced learning techniques, prediction and assessment capabilities, to combine and analyze the information from a variety of sources including passive and active sensors, existing L0/L1 trackers and correlators, as well as from a multitude of other data sources (i.e. weather reports, operator reports, web pages). This allows Total::Insight™ to sift through vast amounts of data, capture complex relations which result in the learning and the real-time recognition of patterns, events and anomalies in order to always produce the most accurate information possible and to continually optimize situational awareness for decision makers.
The project will involve the following end user organizations and industry providers: the Irish Coast Guard which has a strong interest in the knowledge of maritime traffic west of Ireland as well as the detection and tracking of non-reporting/non-compliant vessels, the National Space Centre in Ireland, which provides correlation capabilities and the synthesis of a maritime common operating picture to the Irish Coast Guard, exactEarth which provides the data feed of satellite received AIS data to the National Space Centre, and KSAT which provides satellite radar surveillance imagery to be integrated at the National Space Centre. The evaluation will focus on mission-critical risk-aware SAR operational situations in order to reduce the SAR response time, better focus the response operation, reduce SAR costs and of course save lives.
The results of the project are easily transferable to the Canadian Northern setting. Total::Insight™ provides extensive maritime surveillance capability, including intelligent vessel traffic analysis, and can provide an improved maritime picture for safety (e.g. Search and Rescue) and Security (e.g. illicit activities) and Defence missions. “This program will build upon existing maritime surveillance programs such as I-STOP, Polar Epsilon and Clean Sea Net (EMSA) to provide enhanced knowledge to support both commercial and community users,” said Dr. Rami Abielmona, Vice President of Research and Engineering at Larus Technologies. “Larus envisions that the project results can be extended to the Canadian Maritime domain, in particular in the North, through the provisioning of additional capabilities including persistent surveillance and intelligence report generation.” The GIUK (i.e. Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom) Gap has been selected for demonstration because of its relevance to the North West Passage (NWP) and Northern Sea Route (NSR) with increased traffic entering and leaving those expanding routes pass by the GIUK North Atlantic Gap.
The resulting capabilities will include identifying changes and anomalous activity during maritime reconnaissance, improving vessel anomaly detection and identification, and enhancing situational awareness for large territorial areas including domestic and international coastlines, northern maritime passages, and high value ports and assets. Thus, this project increases efficiency, mainly due to the decline in human operator overload and stress caused by the overwhelming amount of raw satellite-based radar data and the transformation of their roles towards alert investigators, allowing the decision makers to have access to the right information, at the right time, in order to make the right decisions.
About Larus Technologies
Larus Technologies Corporation is a software product and research company, specializing in developing innovative products in computational intelligence and predictive data analytics. Leveraging our experience within the defense and security community, Larus provides advanced and cost effective solutions for Situational Awareness, Public Safety and Critical Infrastructure Protection. Our core product, the Total::Insight™ Decision Support System, uses our patented adaptive learning fusion architecture to deliver accurate, predictive, and time critical knowledge to the decision maker. Integrating our technology optimizes overall situational knowledge and understanding, leading to better decisions and more precise interventions.
