Call: Through-foliage detection, including in the outermost regions of the EU

The primary aims of the Secure Societies Challenge are:

• to enhance the resilience of our society against natural and man-made disasters, ranging from the development of new crisis management tools to communication interoperability, and to develop novel solutions for the protection of critical infrastructure;
• to fight crime and terrorism ranging from new forensic tools to protection against explosives;
• to improve border security, ranging from improved maritime border protection to supply chain security and to support the Union's external security policies including through conflict prevention and peace building;
• and to provide enhanced cyber-security, ranging from secure information sharing to new assurance models

Member States' authorities are carrying out activities all along the European border, and have started to share operational and situational information. But several regions at the borders of the European Union are covered with forests, and face extreme temperature conditions. Detecting, locating, tracking or identifying persons and vehicles crossing the border in forested regions is extremely difficult given that technologies for surveillance through harsh unstructured environments are currently not effective. The increasing risk of irregular flows and immigration across the border with, for instance, Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia or Brazil makes the issue even more acute than in the past.
Systems should be developed that combine or improve surveillance technologies and techniques and arrays of sensors of different sorts capable to provide higher quality detection capabilities and imaging via the integration of different techniques, to achieve wide- and small-area through foliage detection, despite the canopy density, in a real operational context. They could build on airborne, satellite-based, and/or on ground based platforms.

At least three legal entities. Each of the three must be established in a different EU Member State or Horizon 2020 associated country. All three legal entities must be independent of each other. 

Indicative budget: The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of 8 million € would allow for this topic to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Funding Rate: 100%.

Link to the National Contact Point Finder.