GSS EU Science Funding Gateway

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.