At AnsuR we believe in continued innovation and work hard towards the improvement and development of our products to provide the best and most efficient software solutions for visual data communication. We have been awarded several R&D projects by entities such as the European Space Agency and European Commission.
Our research vision is based around technology which enables the fast and accurate communication of relevant visual observations, with a focus on photos and videos. We know that by providing mission-critical high-precision observations quickly, we enable better and faster decision-making and subsequent action, which in turn secures an effective response and allocates resources as efficiently as possible.
Our innovations are focused on providing information to enable the transition from one operational phase to the next within the ‘Observe-Decide-Act’ Model.
In critical situations, one of the core objectives is to provide experts and decision makers rapid access to reliable and relevant observations. Timely situational awareness allows for better decisions, faster reaction times and more efficient allocation of resources.
Technology is thus focused around the provision and communication of operationally relevant content to support the operational phases of: Observe, Decide, Act.
Information is observed in the field, captured and then communicated onwards to the decision-makers. Data can be transmitted by, for example, voice or text, but often the fastest method to provide a comprehensive situational picture is through the taking and sending of precise photos and video.
Throughout the whole process, reliable and fast communication is key to move efficiently from one operational phase to the next.
However, communication networks can often be unreliable or unavailable, particularly susceptible to fail when effective communication is most crucial. When struck by a disaster or confronting a crisis such as earthquakes, floods or riots, once stable networks can become unusable.
In these situations, efficient communication becomes even more important for fast and efficient decision making, yet the low available bandwidth significantly hinders key data transmission and the ability for remote experts to develop an accurate situational awareness.
To date, most individuals and organisations which encounter bandwidth issues resign themselves to struggling with the limited bandwidth available and attempt to send data inefficiently through common software tools which are not optimized to work in low-bandwidth situations.
The unfortunate outcome is that one must either choose to spend significantly more time and money to send full-precision observations, or compromise on the resolution and precision of the data.
This is not opportune, as in urgent or critical situations, observations need to be communicated both clearly and quickly for operationally relevant situational awareness.
Mobile satellite communication systems provide a maximum rate of around 200kbps, making the transmission of pictures and video notoriously slow. Satcom is also prohibitively expensive. A one-minute video from a modern mobile phone sent through satellite can take hours to arrive at its destination and be very expensive.
Mission-critical TETRA/TEDS networks, used world-wide in over 100 countries by police and military, have even lower data rates, with the modern Norwegian network having maximum capacity of 80 kbps.
Difficult communication situations are our specialty.
Our communication paradigm is designed in line with users’ needs: They don´t need pixels and bits per second, but to see what they need to see in sufficient precision to rapidly understand a situation within the shortest possible response time.
There are 3 layers to this challenge:
In other words, if the content has no or little effect on user’s actions or situational awareness, it should ideally not consume limited communications capacity as it not only wastes resources, but also slows down the transfer of the operationally relevant content.
Traditional visual communication systems are only concerned about the compression and transfer of pixels. With limited bandwidth, more compression is needed, resulting in a compromise with overall degradation in quality for the entire image.
At AnsuR, we believe that a compromise between precision, costs and reaction-time is not necessary, and that the communication of critical information should be reliable, quick and seamless.
AnsuR is developing software solutions that further improve communication anywhere, anytime, and solve new challenges for the transmission of high-resolution photos and video over unknown, bandwidth-limited networks. In addition to the interactive aspects of AnsuR software, we have also developed and integrated proprietary protocols and tools to allow for excellent performance also with low data rates and unstable bandwidths.
Solving network challenges through AnsuR’s software offers substantial benefits when communicating through regular networks too. With our solutions, communication is streamlined, and precision becomes available faster. This will become increasingly relevant in the future, as photo and video resolution increases mean corresponding file sizes are growing exponentially, posing challenges for many networks and operational scenarios. So even in everyday situations, one will always be able to communicate and respond to higher precision visual content faster by using AnsuR solutions.
AnsuR has developed software products for PC, smartphones and embedded Linux platforms, to provide a software suite that can provide tailored communicative support in a broad range of situations.
For further information about individual AnsuR software products, please check out our Products page.