TPI Tuesday – ‘No change’ detected: a story of subjective vs objective reporting

Today we have a remarkable edition of TPI Tuesday, as we are showing a case where we detected that there was ‘no change’.

When Orbital Eye provides the CoSMiC-EYE monitoring service to its customers, our data analysts continuously monitor CoSMiC-EYE’s monitoring performance and compare it to data of other monitoring methods, such as aerial- or ground patrol.

In today’s TPI Tuesday, you can see a pile of soil that was reported by an observer in the helicopter. This activity can also be seen in CoSMiC-EYE, but it was never reported because this pile of soil had been there for several months already as can be seen in the two optical images in the middle – and therefore did not pose a threat to the pipeline.

This case illustrates one of the advantages of satellite-based monitoring: the objective aspect of it. For an observer in a helicopter, it’s very hard to determine whether or not a certain pile of soil was there as well during the previous flight, and therefore the helicopter usually reports multiple ‘false alarms’. However, as CoSMiC-EYE is optimized to detect and report changes, and because historical data is available, these ‘false alarms’ won’t be reported by CoSMiC-EYE!

Interesting fact: we have many studies available where we compare CoSMiC-EYE against other monitoring methods. Interested? Send an email to info@orbitaleye.nl