RESEARCH / DEVELOPMENT / TECHNOLOGY PIPELINE TECHNOLOGY JOURNAL 35 1. INTRODUCTION Pipeline operators are responsible for the safe transmis- sion of their products to protect communities, the environ- ment as well as their own assets. Failures are high impact events, which can cause major damage and casualties. The foremost cause of damage to buried pipelines, together with geohazards and corrosion, is Third Party Interferenc- es (TPI’s), such as excavations, construction works or city encroachments.[1] Hence, right-of-way (ROW) monitoring solutions have been introduced over the past decades to mitigate these risks. Basically, any successful ROW-mon- itoring solution should demonstrate at least the following characteristics: 1. Early warning functionality: (imminent) events should be reported to the pipeline operator as soon as possible. 2. Reliability: all events that pose a risk to the pipeline should be reported to the operators with a low false alarm rate. 3. Ease of use: the technology should be simple to use and suitable to be efficiently integrated in the daily workflow of operators. The pipeline sector currently uses manned aerial vehicles as their preferred ROW-monitoring solution. A human ob- server detects anomalies along the pipeline corridor, which are reported to the pipeline operators. In general, human observations from aerial platforms can be very selective resulting in a low false alarm rate, but are also subjective (different observers will report different things) and have a relatively low revisit frequency (due to high costs) causing many TPI’s to be left unnoticed, as every location is only visited (bi-)weekly. Furthermore, most aerial platforms such as helicopters or drones, are not reliable under severe weather conditions. As a result, aerial platform-based mon- itoring solutions are, despite the low false alarm rate, far from optimal due to the low temporal frequency, subjective reporting of events and weather dependence. Many of the shortcomings of aerial platforms can be ad- dressed by space-born Earth Observation (EO) platforms, which are already numerously present in an orbit around earth. ROW-monitoring using satellites is no longer a mere theoretical concept, but has grown over the past couple of years into a mature and competitive technology. Hence, this technology is now in the final validation stages, pre- paring for widespread deployment in the pipeline industry in the coming years. This paper will present results for a number of validation campaigns, demonstrating that satellite based TPI monitoring methods are indeed a valid alternative as an early-warning ROW-monitoring solution compared to modern-day helicopter surveys. is introduced, discussing both the technology as well as its operational implementation. Next, a number of valida- tion studies are discussed in Section 3 to show the current performance of satellite-based monitoring and compare the technology to aerial-based solutions. Then, a summary of the main conclusions is given in the discussion of Section 4. 2 WAY MONITORING FROM SPACE BACKGROUND – RIGHT-OF- The satellite-based monitoring technology discussed in this paper has been developed by Orbital Eye, a compa- ny specializing in satellite data analytics. Instead of data products, Orbital Eye offers tailored integrated solutions. In the case of TPI monitoring, pipeline inspectors and manag- ers are provided with a decision support platform to detect, track and manage TPI’s along their assets. One of the challenges for satellite-based monitoring sys- tems is the visual impediment caused by clouds. To over- come this problem, Orbital Eye’s monitoring technology is based on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites which are unaffected by cloud cover.[2] The solution makes use of the Sentinel-1 satellite constellation which can observe most locations on Earth up to 120 times a year.[3] The average revisit interval over the whole Earth is six days. This capability to revisit pipeline routes multiple times per month, at a reduced cost compared to traditional aerial surveys, offers the possibility to intercept more potentially hazardous activities. This in turn not only reduces the risks on major incidents, but also helps in avoiding smaller dam- age that on the long run can result in leaks and fugitive emissions impacting the environment. At the heart of the Orbital Eye technology is a modified SAR Coherent Change Detection algorithm that compares a stack of co-registered radar images at different capture times. The system acquires radar satellite images along the pipeline routes, and automatically processes and anal- yses these images to detect anomalies and filter irrelevant changes. For this, both classical image processing and fil- tering techniques are used, as well as Artificial Intelligence (AI) based methods. These filters have been developed, calibrated and trained using the vast amounts of ‘ground truth data’ collected during the past five years of pilots and operational campaigns to offer the best possible detection performance. In this way, activities undertaken or caused by humans, which pose the largest threat to the pipeline – such as excavations, illegal settlements and landslides – are retained and reported. In Section 3, the satellite-based monitoring solution CoS- MiC-EYE (Combined Sar Multi-spectral Change detection), Once anomalies are detected within the pipeline corridor, the software generates an alert which is reported to the client through a notification (see Figure 1). In addition to