The ISFEREA Action provides scientific and technical support to EU policies addressing global security and crisis management, especially those concerned with improving the EU’s disaster risk reduction measures and with enhancing the EU’s crisis prevention, preparedness and response capabilities in crises varying from humanitarian disasters to conflict and political crises.

The ISFEREA Action contributes to those EU policies and underpinning scientific challenges by means of the exploitation of new-generation high resolution (HR) and very high resolution (VHR) optical and radar remotely sensed data. Computer-enhanced visual interpretation, automatic feature extraction and image understanding are the key technologies composing the scientific core competences of ISFEREA.  Information extracted from remotely sensed data is then fused with other data sources in order to build information products and analyses by geo-spatial modelling and cartographic representation.

ISFEREA works closely with services in the European Commission, EU institutions (European External Action Service), and international (e.g. United Nations, World Bank) organisations.

Examples of ISFEREA activities include:

• Applying ISFEREA’s expertise in automatic information image mining and understanding to formal and informal human settlement analysis, disaster risk assessment,  post-crisis damage assessment for recovery/reconstruction, and millennium development goal applications.

• Applying ISFEREA’s competence in image processing and analysis to contribute to the implementation of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS); an international agreement established to keep “conflict diamonds” from entering the legitimate trade of rough diamonds and thus to guarantee International security.

• Applying ISFEREA’s competence in image processing and analysis to security monitoring and mapping applications.

• Contributing to the development of the Security dimension of GMES.