In today’s TPI Tuesday, we present a case where a large agricultural activity took place, and many trees and bushes were removed. This type of activity often poses a threat to the pipelines due to the use of excavators, and because it can lead to soil erosion, and hence pipeline operators should be aware of these activities.

The upper image is an image from the field investigation, the image on the left shows the detection of the activity using the Sentinel-1 satellites, and the image on the right shows the detection of the activity using a Sentinel-2 widely-used vegetation index, the NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index). 🌳

NDVI uses the NIR and the Red bands, it’s calculated as NDVI=(NIR-Red / NIR+Red) and the values range from -1 to +1. It detects and quantifies the presence of vegetation, where the high values indicate the presence of green and healthy vegetation, and low values, the presence of bare soil, urban area, and water. This is because the healthy vegetation reflects the NIR light and absorbs the red light, and vice versa.

Interesting fact: The human eye can’t see the NIR light, so this is where the beauty of the optical remote sensing techniques arises! 😎

Satellite based services such as COSMIC-EYE do not only detect the activities that can pose a threat to the pipelines, but a few more ‘special’ cases that may surprise you!

In today’s special edition TPI – Valentine Monday, you can see a heart appear in a high-resolution image. Who could have guessed that Monitoring Services could get this romantic?

The OE Team wants to take this opportunity to wish you a beautiful day filled with love and happiness!

– With Love –
The OE Team

 

Today’s TPI-Tuesday shows a clear example of the creation of a construction site that involves ground works. If not reported to the pipeline operator and handled with great care, these ground works can be dangerous to the pipeline. It is thus key that the operator knows about the activity in a timely manner.

The radar pictures at the bottom left show processed Sentinel-1 SAR images we analyse with Orbital Eye’s algorithms. The difference over time is shown in the change map at the bottom right. This image is filtered with complex algorithms to distinguish relevant changes. Subsequently, high resolution data (being visible in the middle) is ordered from optical satellite-date providers, to help the customer to classify the change.

If you have a specific activity in mind that you want to see covered in next week’s TPI Tuesday, feel free to send us an email at info@orbitaleye.nl!

In today’s TPI Tuesday, we present an example of where road repairs on top of a pipeline were detected.

In the top-right picture, you can see the SAR-imagery that was analysed and in which the activity was detected. The CoSMiC-EYE technology automatically analyses a series of SAR-imagery over time, to check for any changes, resulting in a ‘change blob’, which you can also see in the top-right picture. When a change is detected, several filters are applied to filter out irrelevant changes – as you can imagine, a car parked on top of a pipeline running through a city usually doesn’t pose a threat to the pipeline, and this change will therefore be filtered out. However, a car which is parked close to a pipeline in the middle of a forest, for example at the location of today’s TPI Tuesday, is unusual and should not be filtered out – Orbital Eye, therefore, applies different filters for different types of terrain, distinguishing between for example agricultural, urban and industrial areas.