01 · The environment
Jam the link, and most ISR payloads become dead weight. The intelligence was never at the sensor.
Conventional ISR streams video to a ground station where a person watches it. That chain breaks in three places: bandwidth, jamming, and the attention of an operator three hours into a shift. Scotopic moves detection and tracking to the sensor itself, so the chain has one link left. What goes down is track state, 26 bytes per update instead of megabits of video, and it buffers when the link drops.
The same shift is now doctrine. Fibre-guided drones carry no radio, which is exactly why the RF layer that used to raise the first alarm no longer does, and why optical detection is being bought again. NATO’s SAPIENT architecture asks sensors to process locally and report summaries rather than raw feeds. Scotopic was built that way from the first commit.
02 · Capability
One hard problem, done properly.
Small aerial targets at range, against sky, terrain and clutter. A drone at 2 km is a handful of pixels: at that scale shape carries almost no information, and most detectors quietly stop working. This is the part we built for.
Kalman tracking with coasting through occlusion, so a target that passes behind terrain is picked up again rather than lost. Motion is what separates a drone from a bird when shape cannot.
A versioned track contract with bearing, elevation, size and per-component uncertainty. Buffers on link loss, flushes losslessly on reconnect. The human makes the call.
Detect → Track → Report → Human decision
03 · Architecture
System architecture
Perception and tracking run at the sensor. Guidance-free. The operator makes the call.
04 · The product
MODULE · FOVEA
FOVEA
The perception module. Detect, track, report. At the sensor, without GPS, without a link.
TRL 4 overall · self-assessed. Edge deployment, output contract and packaging at TRL 5; detector and tracker at 4. SAPIENT interface in progress.
Measured
In progress
MEASURED = reproduced on the hardware named above, or on a held-out split where stated, on a stated date. IN PROGRESS = not yet measured, published when it is, whatever it shows. Software module today: no sealed hardware unit.
05 · Measured performance
Measured performance
26 B
per track update, on the wire
compact binary, size pinned by test
2.1 kbps sustained at 10 Hz
5.76 FPS
the whole 4K field of view, every frame, at the sensor
nothing has to emit, and nothing has to point us at it
10 min sustained · no throttling
Every figure on this page was reproduced on the hardware it names, on a stated date. The numbers we have not taken yet are listed as such, with the same weight.
Method and raw logs available on request
Accelerated figures measured 13 Aug 2026 on the target hardware named above; the 595 ms CPU baseline measured 28 Jul 2026 on the same board without the accelerator. False-alarm figures measured 13 Aug 2026 through the shipped build on target-free sky, every denominator recorded. Recall of 86.5% is a held-out split, in-distribution; the cross-dataset figure of 57.2% is on the same page for the same reason. Field validation on self-collected footage is under way and will be published measured, whatever it shows.
All footage on this page: system demonstration, synthetic scenario.
06 · Where this sits
A component, not a replacement.
There is real work happening in autonomy right now, and some of it is very good. Almost none of it is aimed at the specific problem of finding a small aerial target at range, on cheap compute, with a false-alarm rate an operator will tolerate. That is the whole of what we do.
A number is worth what the source is willing to publish beside it. That is why the cross-dataset figure and the uncharacterised rows sit on this page next to the good ones, in the same type. If you would rather not take ours on faith, run the evaluation on your own footage and read what it says. No NDA, no call.
07 · For integrators
Drops in. Changes nothing else.
Scotopic FOVEA takes your camera feed and returns a track. It does not touch your autopilot, your navigation or your radio, and it keeps seeing when the signals are gone. Onboard an aircraft, or fixed on a mast.
A software perception module today. A sealed sensor and compute unit is on the roadmap, not built. We will say so until it exists.
Commercial parts, measured today. Folding the accelerated path into the shipped build is in progress; the container runs CPU-only until it lands. no custom silicon, no cloud dependency and no licence server. Roughly €200 of compute per node. It scales up if you have more; it was built where there is less.
Nothing external in the loop. Detection and tracking depend on the sensor and the compute next to it, not on GPS, the datalink or a ground station. Track output is relative: bearing, elevation, size, each with its own uncertainty. World-frame geolocation needs host position and attitude from your platform, and we report the error that adds.
One versioned track contract, regardless of platform. Compact binary on the wire at 26 bytes today, structured JSON for integration and debugging. Bearing and elevation carry decomposed uncertainty, so the output drops straight into your filter instead of being re-derived. MAVLink and ROS 2 bindings on the roadmap. Full spec on request.
08 · About
Why software, and why us.
Scotopic started in robotics. Building machines that move is a good problem, but after a while the interesting part stops being the mechanism and starts being the judgement: what the machine sees, what it makes of it, and what it hands back to the person responsible.
That question got sharper when it stopped being academic. On this flank of Europe the airspace is contested now, and the aircraft flying in it go blind the moment someone decides to jam them.
Hardware is where you get locked in. Software is where you stay free. A perception layer is not tied to one airframe, one vendor or one supply chain. It runs on parts anyone can buy, on aircraft that already exist, and it makes them better without replacing them. That is the whole thesis: do not build another platform, build the thing that gives the platforms already in the air something worth having.
As for why us. We are small, and small is the wrong reason to buy from someone, so here is the right one. We chose one narrow problem, small aerial targets at range on cheap compute, and we measure it the way it deserves. When our validation set turned out to be flattering us, we rebuilt it and wrote down that every number before that line was wrong. That habit is the product as much as the code is.
Scotopic is built in Romania, on the eastern flank, against the threat picture that is actually here. It is deliberately ISR only: detect, track, report. No guidance, no weapons, no autonomous engagement. The decision stays with a human, by design and not by accident.
2025 S.R.L.
09 · Contact
Request a briefing.
Request a briefingtraian@scotopic.eu
For integrators, programmes and investors. Ask for the method note, or for the evaluation kit to run on your own footage.
Applicant · NATO DIANA 2026