The trend in navigational accidents no longer appears to decrease. In a Formal Safety Assessment (IMO NAV59-6, Annex 1) 5.544 navigational and 7.275 other accidents resulted in the loss of 6.264 lives (2001-2010). The coincide of EU policies on safer and more efficient waterborne operations and in particular the e-maritime initiative with IMO’s strategy for e-navigation opens a unique window of opportunity to influence the maritime sector and make substantial impact. Funding of EfficienSea 2 will enable the consortium to exploit this window of opportunity, supporting EU policies and marine traffic management through services to: 1. Improve navigational safety and efficiency 2. Improve Arctic navigation and emergency response 3. Decrease administrative burdens 4. Improve environmental monitoring & enforcement Lasting impact will be ensured by five enabling actions: 1. Development of the Maritime Cloud – a communication framework for both e-maritime and e-navigation - enabling efficient sharing of information between all maritime stakeholders 2. Maturing emerging communication technologies, improving ships connectivity 3. Proactive facilitation of standardisation to maximize adoption and impact 4. Showcasing solutions in two very different geographic areas. Web-based initial implementation of the services will be done in the Arctic and the Baltic 5. Ensure an ambitious upgrade of international maritime safety regimes through a strong participation in regulatory bodies including EU and IMO EfficienSea 2 has gathered a unique level of competence in a consortium of 32 partners from 10 countries representing authorities, academia, international organisations as well as equipment manufacturers combining all the right capacities for effectively achieving these ambitious objectives.

The aim of realistic digital imaging is the creation of high quality imagery, which faithfully represents the physical environment. The ultimate goal is to create images, which are perceptually indistinguishable from a real scene. The RealVision network brings together leading universities, centers focused on industrial development and companies in Multimedia, Optics, Visual Communication, Visual Computing, Computer Graphics and Human Vision research across Europe, with the aim of training a new generation of scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs that will move Europe into a leading role in innovative hyper-realistic imaging technologies. Current imaging technologies capture only a fraction of visual information that the human eye can see. The colours and dynamic range are inadequate for most real-world scenes and not all depth cues required for natural 3D vision are captured. This limits the realism of the experience and has hampered the introduction of 3D technology. Advancement in imaging technologies makes it possible to circumvent these bottlenecks in visual systems. As a result, new visual signal-processing areas have emerged such as light fields, ultra-high definition, highframe rate and high dynamic range imaging. The novel combinations of those technologies can facilitate a hyper-realistic visual experience. This will without doubt be the future frontier for new imaging systems. However there are several technological barriers that need to be overcome as well as challenges in what are the best solutions perceptually. The goal of this network is to combine expertise from several disciplines as engineering, computer science, physics, vision science and psychology – usually disconnected – and train ESRs to be capable of working with all stages and aspects of visual processing to overcome existing interdisciplinary and intersectorial barriers to efficiently develop truly perceptually better visual imaging systems.