TOLOMEO - Tools for Open Multi-Risk Assessment using Earth Observation Data (2015)

In Cooperation with:

• University of Pavia, Telecommunications and Remote Sensing Laboratory
• Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE)
• Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES)
• Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Computer Vision Laboratory (LVC)
• Leibniz University of Hannover, Institut für Informationsverarbeitung (TNT)
• Hyperspectral Computing Laboratory at the University of Extremadura

The project “Tools for Open Multi-Risk Assessment using Earth Observation Data” (TOLOMEO) is funded under the Marie Curie International Research Staff Exchange Scheme (PIRSES-GA-2009) with the ultimate goal to establish an international cooperation between partners in Europe and South-America focused on the development of free tools for remotely sensed data analysis.

Motivation:

The availability and volume of readily accessible remotely sensed data, collected from heterogeneous platforms (e.g. airborne and satellite instruments) has been growing exponentially in the last few years. However, a common problem in the remote sensing community is the lack of software and tools commonly accepted by all and with the potential to effectively extract information from massive and ever-growing remote sensing data archives, with many partners resorting to commercial hardware and others designing their own tools and using them only internally despite the potential of such tools to provide an important service to other partners in the community. In this regard, the main motivation of the “Tools for Open Multi-Risk Assessment using Earth Observation Data” (TOLOMEO) project is the need to establish a collaborative environment towards the development of standardized and open software tools to address relevant problems in which the extraction of information from remotely sensed data can provide outstanding benefits to the society, such as multi-risk assessment.

Focus:

The focus of this proposal will be the development of free/open source tools in the framework of collaborative environment with emphasis on remote sensing analysis tools for risk assessment. The software tools that we plan to develop aim at being robust, easy to use and "free" (if not open source) in order for them to be used in a collaborative way by researchers and other actors in our community (and possibly in other communities) for extracting information from imagery that may be useful to map risk and its parts: vulnerability, exposure and hazard. All of this will be accomplished by exploiting the experience that each of the partners of the TOLOMEO consortium already possess in their own discipline of the world of software development for remote sensing applications.