Orbital Eye uses 2 types of satellite data for effective pipeline monitoring; Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and optical data. A high temporal SAR analysis is performed for the full pipeline network to detect Third Party Interferences (TPIs) near the network.

Disadvantage of SAR? You can detect a change, but not always the exact cause.

So why not just use high-resolution imagery instead of radar?

✅ SAR data can be used in the presence of clouds
✅ SAR data is free, high-resolution images are not

To complement the SAR data, we order high-res images, but only for the areas where the SAR has detected potential TPIs, to avoid unnecessary tasking of high-res satellites. This calls for a classic optimization approach: how to cover the maximum number of radar TPIs with the minimum amount of high-res km2, taking into account various constraints and environmental parameters.

Using advanced optimization algorithms, such as differential evolution, particle swarm optimization and various other genetic algorithms, our in-house developed automated tasking tool is able to find the best possible areas to be submitted for tasking by a high-res satellite. The implementation of this tool is a big step forward to further enhance the scalability of our pipeline monitoring solution CoSMiC-EYE.

 

Today, Ana Stavreva and Arnaud van den Berg visited Paris to give a presentation about Orbital Eye and CoSMiC-EYE at the Gesip, the organization that sets the industry standards for transport pipeline operators. It was great to see many French pipeline operators join the meeting and to discuss with them how CoSMiC-EYE could add value to their monitoring procedures. 🇫🇷

Of course we couldn’t resist to also take some pictures of Third Party Interferences we encountered in Paris. And as a bonus we walked into the Christmas market in La Defense! 🎄

Yesterday we visited our partner Ellipsis Drive in their offices in Ede to work together on the final stages of our MIT cooperation grant funded by the Provincie Zuid-Holland.

In this project, our expertise on applying machine learning to satellite data for monitoring solutions is combined with Ellipsis’ expertise on efficient infrastructure solutions for storing geospatial data. This makes it easily sharable and efficiently accessibly for machine learning purposes.

Great to meet face-to-face again and have some hands-on time together to build cool things! 😎

Last weekend, we all went together on a trip to northern France to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Orbital Eye with the team. We strengthened the bond between each other while learning a lot about French history. Three days full of emotions and unforgettable memories like indoor skydiving, a city tour in Lille, tasting French cuisine in fabulous restaurants, nights out, games in a castle, and many more. What’s next? The holiday is over, so it is time to get back to our normal lives and work even harder than before!

Last week our data scientist Alessandro Marzo and M&S intern Ana Stavreva joined in the field inspection round of Third-Party Interferences (TPI) detected by our CoSMiC-EYE pipeline monitoring solution. These inspection rounds are part of our continuous system improvement and validation efforts and are used to test new service features under real-life conditions.
For Alessandro and Ana, it is a great opportunity to experience the solution they are working on firsthand as if being an end-user. This allows them to better understand and appreciate the needs and requirements of our customers which will in turn lead to services optimally tailored to our customers’ needs.

Although, the cloudy sky’s look quite threatening in the photos, Alessandro and Ana were lucky and kept their feet muddles this time.