Programme Category
Programme Name
Programme Description
The European Defence Fund (EDF) is the Commission’s initiative to support collaborative defence research and development, and to foster an innovative and competitive defence industrial base.
Identifier Code
Call
Summary
Image recognition technologies become essential for defence applications. There is in particular an increasing need for forces to analyse their environment more efficiently in order to enhance decision-making, responsiveness and survivability while ensuring the observation function effectively. This need is reinforced by the emergence of new forms of threats such as hypersonic, swarming, miniaturised or stealth weapons,
which require increased speed, sensitivity or accuracy of the recognition systems. This need applies to manned and unmanned platforms as well as to wide-area or longlasting surveillance.
Detailed Call Description
Besides, databases are essential for training, testing and certifying artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as image recognition systems. However, collecting data that is both representative of military operational scenarios and sharable for AI system development is a complex task. Furthermore, data annotation (e.g., definition of regions in images, labelling…) and curation need significant efforts that are often underestimated. The lack of specialised entities missioned to serve the community by actively creating representative and sharable databases further hinders the creation of such databases. These issues are often a bottleneck in system development. Frameworks should be developed that enable or facilitate cooperation and sharing of image databases for defence.
In addition, new high-resolution sensor technologies provide larger amounts of information that are difficult to transmit in their entirety in real time. Automatic processing located near the sensor is needed to reduce the information flow. This requires joint optimisation of software and hardware and can involve trade-offs between recognition performances and integration constraints.
Proposals should address the development and objective testing of image recognition systems for defence, the creation of the needed new databases, and the integration of the developed image recognition technologies near the sensors and objective testing of these integrated systems. Any relevant types of images and sensors (visible, infrared, multiband, hyperspectral…) and any well-defined types of recognition tasks (detection and classification for well-defined classes of objects, detection and identification of known objects, tracking…) can be considered.
Call Total Budget
Financing percentage by EU or other bodies / Level of Subsidy or Loan
100%
Thematic Categories
- Information Technology
- Justice - Security
- Research, Technological Development and Innovation
Eligibility for Participation
- Central Government
- Large Enterprises
- Legal Entities
- Local Authorities
- Local Authority clusters
- Researchers/Research Centers/Institutions
- Semi-governmental organisations
- Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)
- State-owned Enterprises
Call Opening Date
Call Closing Date
National Contact Point(s)
Ministry of Defense
172-174 Strovolos Avenue, 2048 Strovolos, Nicosia,
website: https://mod.gov.cy/
Telephone: 22 807500
Email: defence@mod.gov.cy
Department of Research and Innovation
Phones: 22 807755, 22 807754
Email: research.innovation@mod.gov.cy
EU Contact Point
European Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space (DEFIS)
https://ec.europa.eu/info/departments/defence-industry-and-space_en