Safe Pro Group Inc. (Nasdaq:SPAI) announced that its Safe Pro AI subsidiary has completed a Phase III drone survey operation in Ukraine, under a purchase order awarded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The company analyzed land in Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine, providing the UNDP with detailed reports and survey data of items of interest detected by its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models.
SpotlightAI™ and Mine Detection
The Phase III operation marks a significant milestone in a multi-year technology evaluation program by the UNDP, conducted in partnership with the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). This Mine Action Project, in collaboration with Ukraine's Ministry of the Economy (MoE) and supported by Croatia, France, Malta, the Netherlands, and Sweden, aims to showcase innovative tools utilizing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles/Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UAV/UGV) to enhance land release efficiency in agricultural areas.
SpotlightAI™, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), is Safe Pro's hyper-scalable, cloud-based ecosystem for analyzing imagery collected by commercial drones. It employs advanced machine learning models for small object detection and data reporting, built on a proprietary dataset capable of identifying over 150 types of land mines, unexploded ordnance (UXO), and explosive remnants of war (ERW). The system rapidly identifies and GPS-locates these hazards, producing high-resolution orthomosaic maps from drone-based imagery, which significantly reduces the time and costs associated with human-based image analysis.
Impact and Scalability
Dan Erdberg, Chairman and CEO of Safe Pro Group, stated that SpotlightAI™ has demonstrated its capability to enhance the current land survey process through intensive real-world evaluations by UNDP, MoE, and other demining stakeholders in Ukraine. The AI makes sense of thousands of images, providing strategic situational awareness that would take humans days, weeks, or months to analyze. Erdberg emphasized the company's commitment to helping save lives and restore Ukraine's vital agricultural production capacity.
The software ecosystem can process massive amounts of sub-centimeter-level drone imagery to generate detailed, high-resolution orthomosaic maps highlighting objects of interest. Detection results are plotted on customizable, GPS-tagged, sub-centimeter-level maps, offering a "bird's-eye view" of the surveyed area. This provides enhanced situational awareness for planning clearing and land release efforts by local governments and humanitarian aid organizations. AWS recently funded and published a case study on the effectiveness of SpotlightAI™.
Addressing the Landmine Crisis in Ukraine
The rapid, highly scalable analysis capability of SpotlightAI™ is crucial in Ukraine, where an estimated area exceeding 139,300 km2 is potentially contaminated by UXO, according to the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine as of August 2024. Safe Pro Group's AI-driven solutions and automated processing of drone imagery detect and map explosive threats, addressing significant demining challenges in the country. The company's comprehensive cloud-based datasets and advanced protective gear improve the safety, efficiency, and speed of demining operations, delivering actionable intelligence and solutions for remediating hazardous remnants of war.
