Kick-off of the HYCOS project, co-coordinated by GeoNumerics: an application of mapKITE to coastal monitoring

on 16 January 2018.

On 25th of January 2018, GeoNumerics will join the French company GEOSAT in Bordeaux, France, to trigger the activities within the project HYCOS, an acronym for Hybrid Coastal Surveying. The goal of HYCOS is to establish a service for monitoring, accurately and frequently, the evolution of the coastline based on a cross-sectorial approach: the combination of free satellite imagery data with topographic LiDAR surveys with Mobile Mapping Systems (MMS) and drone-based aerial photogrammetry. These three mapping techniques are versatile (available satellites, MMS mounted on quad, and easy-to-operate drones) and together they enable surveys to be carried out at least twice a year in order to analyse physical phenomenon related to seasonal changes as well as the impacts of sporadic, high-intensity storms. The proposed multi-resolution imaging approach will produce accurate 3D geo-spatial data of the monitored coast, at a high resolution (drone imagery reaches millimetre-level ground resolution), high density (LiDAR reach around one million of measurements per second) and with large coverage (satellite imagery covers hundreds of kilometers of terrain footprint per image).

With the participation of Telespazio France as an innovation actor for the satellite imagery component, HYCOS will set the ground for an new implementation of GeoNumerics' patented mapping paradigm mapKITE. Using the potential of combined drone-plus-ground mapping techniques, mapKITE will be used to analyse the phenomenon related to seasonal changes of the shore in sensible areas. This is a major step in the mapKITE life after its public funding period through the Horizon 2020 project.

The project HYCOS has been awared to GEOSAT and GeoNumerics under the umbrella of NEPTUNE, which stands for "New Cross Sectoral Value Chains Creation across Europe Facilitated By Clusters for SMEs’ Innovation in Blue Growth". NEPTUNE targets Blue Growth, a key emerging industry to be supported via inter cluster collaboration as well as a key driver for the EU economy. According to the European Commission’s strategic document Innovation in the Blue Economy: realising the potential of our seas and oceans for jobs and growth, Blue Growth has a great potential as it represents roughly 5.4 million jobs and generates a gross added value of almost €500 billion a year.

GeoNumerics is a research and development (R&D) intensive small-and-medium-enterprise (SME) company specialised in geomatics and accurate navigation.

GEOSAT is a group of 140 people involved in all domains related to 3D/4D measurement with a solid experience in public and private geometric surveys since 2000. GEOSAT has set up its own R&D center, innovating in 3D modeling, urban planning, geo-processing, detection & geo-referencing networks.

NEPTUNE is an innovation action project supported by the European Commission and its HORIZON 2020 programme under the call for proposal INNOSUP-1-2015, which allows participating clusters to develop a cascade funding scheme (funding distributed to consortia for third parties services) to support innovative projects led by SMEs and would be entrepreneurs.

Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available over 7 years (2014 to 2020). It couples research and innovation with emphasis on excellent science and industrial leadership, and tackles the EU societal challenges. H2020 goal is to ensure that Europe produces world-class science, removes barriers to innovation and makes it easier for the public and private sectors to work together in delivering innovation.

PROJECT DETAILS

Acronym: HYCOS
Title: Hybrid Coastal Monitoring
Period: 2018-01-01 to 2018-10-31
Funding: European Commission (EC) - Horizon 2020 (H2020) through the NEPTUNE project (INNOSUP-1-2015)
Participants: GeoNumerics (ES), GEOSAT (FR)
Other participants: Telespazio France (FR) as Innovator Actor

H2020 web: https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/
NEPTUNE project web: http://neptune-project.eu/

This project has received funding from the European Community's Horizon 2020 Programme under Grant Agreement NEP-EURECAT-84-GEONUMERICS.