ESA to test Dotphoton’s technology for use in space

Dotphoton developed a software solution for raw image data compression for critical applications with guaranteed raw image quality and fidelity preservation thanks to insights from quantum physics. The company’s core technology has been validated by major Swiss research centres and is already being used by biomedical camera manufacturers and laboratories.

Expanding its scope into the space field, Dotphoton has signed a commercial agreement with the European Space Agency's (ESA) GSTP Technology Programme with the coordination of the Swiss Space Office, to validate the integration of Dotphoton’s compression technology for space applications. The output data generated from Dotphoton is suitable for the latest generation of machine vision and AI image processing algorithms, which is particularly important in the context of the permanently growing space image data. The products allow saving a factor of 5–10 in storage space and network bandwidth, as well as the associated time, power and costs.

The GSTP supports technology developments for ESA’s future missions, ensuring that the right technology is available at the right maturity at the right time. Therefore, this project will help to bring Dtophoton’s software solution to a higher maturity level and to efficiently explore two possible paths towards a performant hardware implementation, namely based on Vision Processing Unit (VPU) or Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology.

The final product, which will be co-developed by Dotphoton and ESA, could help ESA’s optical missions to reduce costs in the processing of raw image data and in satellite-to-ground image transmission, one of the important cost drivers for all modern missions.

“After successful commercial implementations of Dotphoton’s software in the biotech industry, we are looking forward to exploring the potential of our technology for spatial data. And we are very proud to start the collaboration with such a renowned partner as ESA,” says Dotphoton’s CEO, Eugenia Balysheva.

(Press release/ran)