Organisation: WP 3000
Land and Infrastructure Surveillance
The main objective for the Land and Infrastructure Surveillance Cluster is to improve the European capability in securing terrestrial assets in the areas of Energy and Transport (e.g. critical infrastructure), Borders Crossing (e.g. illegal trafficking) and Policing and intelligence
(e.g. big events, treaties monitoring). This will be achieved through incorporation, processing, integration and fusion of data and information currently available from state–of–the art surveillance systems and services, along with extension of these systems and services through development and incorporation of new technologies, techniques and sources, based on satellite assets.
The final aim is the increment of the prevention capabilities and the improvement of the response time.
Although during the project execution the testing of the surveillance services developed shall be set up for fixed scenarios
(e.g., pipelines, EC summit,..), the final objective is to define a common and coherent service infrastructure and framework where the
European capabilities for Land and Infrastructure Surveillance can be deployed. This will be achieved by defining the process
for integration of the available and future technologies and the basis for the future monitoring harmonized system.
On a S&T level, the objectives include a set of technological improvements applicable to all the areas of the cluster:
Change detection (.e.g. vegetation classification for Pipelines and Land Border) , through the use of
mainly VHR optical data.
order to improve the added value information provided to the user (e.g. real–time sensor
output with archived geospatial data).
of SAR interferometry and the impact on critical or vulnerable infrastructures
and in particular in buried transportation lines like pipelines.
How will space products benefit the land applications of LIMES?
Security scenarios often preclude access to the area of interest. For example, information on nuclear sites in countries that do not provide access to inspectors or information on conflict areas that may be too dangerous to be visited can be collected and distributed to the relevant user only by Remote Sensing including Earth Observation from Space. Land border and EU infrastructure surveillance as well as support to big Event planning are vital activities to be carried out to enforce the fight against terrorism and organized crime. These activities can benefit from the use of satellite technologies to integrate the ground networks.
Satellite technologies and in particular Earth Observation (EO) based technologies provide a valuable source of data for land and infrastructure monitoring by increasing the spatial and time coverage and by providing a routinely coherent source of data.
EO based information is systematically produced with a specific quality, periodicity and format and therefore will constitute a reliable source of information to monitor specific targets. The fact that EO based systems provide repetitively data, makes this technology appropriate to asses specific characteristics of the targets and areas and follow their possible evolution in time. The significance of the evolution of the scene characteristics and its applicability will depend on the specific cases.
The Land and Infrastructure cluster aims at contributing to the development of European S&T capabilities in the area of land border surveillance, treaties monitoring, event planning and critical infrastructure surveillance providing an integrated approaches to the homeland surveillance.
This will be achieved by making use of satellite technologies such as optical (e.g. SPOT 5.2.5 m resolution and commercial high resolution satellites like QuickBird, IKONOS), SAR (i.e. GMES Sentinel 1C-band SAR, new generation satellites like TerraSar-X, COSMO)
and in particular by integrating the data provided by these different satellite/space technologies with also terrain and in situ information.
As for the above mentioned critical infrastructure surveillance area, the relevant capabilities will make use, in particular, InSAR data that allows determination of surface displacement down to the precision of the order of centimetres that are imperceptible to the human eye. This might identify the infrastructure at risk from unintentionally or maliciously caused subsidence.
Regarding the land border surveillance, treaties monitoring, event planning areas, remote sensing techniques will be used, in particular, for faster and more accurate identification of elements from the images and for detection of unforeseen changes or unexpected features.
As explained so far, the Land and Infrastructure cluster capabilities benefit from the satellite technologies through the use, in particular, of optical and SAR features. In the same way it is by mean of satellite technologies that the Land and Infrastructure cluster may provide improvements and contributions to the Aeronautics and Space objectives.
In summary, the Land and Infrastructure cluster aims to contribute to the wider EU societal and policy objectives stated under the FP6 Aeronautics and Space Call by:
- collecting and clustering the requirements expressed by the users and involving them within the project lifetime
- providing a real improvement for the surveillance, through the optimization of costs and increasing the performances of the current surveillance methods.
- improving capability of authorities to provide evidence in cases of illegal activity;
- providing a sound reference basis on which to justify treaties fulfilment.
- integration of existing research results, and background knowledge.
