Ground movements pose a largely invisible threat to pipelines and rail networks, which are costly to monitor and can lead to accidents with serious economic and environmental consequences. LiveEO has introduced an automated satellite-based ground deformation monitoring solution that provides operators with a risk assessment directly from space.
Monitoring large networks such as pipelines and railways is very challenging for operators, especially when the threat being monitored is not directly visible to the human eye. Constant ground movements can lead to stresses in e.g. pipelines and ultimately to leaks with harmful effects on the environment. Traditional approaches to monitoring include the use of in-situ sensors and field measurements, both of which fail to provide continuous monitoring of large areas of high granularity, and if they do, the solution is costly.
Based on metrics such as total displacement, rate of displacement, and local spatial gradients, the system assesses the risk to the asset. If defined thresholds are exceeded, it automatically generates work orders for on-site inspections. All information is available via web and mobile apps. The cloud-hosted software incorporates archived SAR data from 2014 and automatically incorporates newly acquired imagery into the time series analysis, allowing long-term trends and subtle patterns of movement to be identified.
