Aerial surveillance has been found to be a rapid, efficient, and low cost way of conducting regular network inspections, as required by the regulations put in place over interstate pipelines and electric transmission networks by governments worldwide.

Pipelines, electrical transmission lines, railroads and waterways all require periodic inspection of the assets and diligent inspection of easements. Because of the wide spatial distribution of these resources, obtaining a complete and timely periodic assessment of a corridor and its infrastructure condition presents a challenge.

The aerial corridor survey has emerged as a credible patrol solution. For example, by flying in aircraft along asset corridors, managers obtain a clear view of the systems they maintain, making notes and records along the way. Unfortunately, this technique limits the inspection period to the time that the mission is being flown, requires an ‘expert’ in the passenger seat, and only provides a conditional assessment to those who board the mission and only an exception report to the manager.

Today, the use of digital photographs as well as video and its audio narration is an extremely valuable tool for documentation and communication. Helicopter patrol and video recording of the corridor inspection is now an industry norm. The recordings extend the time in which visual assessment can be conducted and potentially enable the cooperative review of asset conditions by a body of expert inspectors. Helicopter platforms uniquely enable ‘low and slow’ flights, acquiring a continuous visual record of the corridor without motion blur. In addition, video recorders incorporate in-flight voice records from the cockpit intercom system adding informative audio commentary during review.

With many of these patrols the video remains recorded to VCR tape. While this format is reliable and seemingly low cost it can only be forced to recall detail with some difficulty. Some aerial service providers overlay global positioning system (GPS) data with a text-captioning device on each video frame. While valuable as a watermark, this method does not solve the requirement of rapid random access to the video information.

Technical disruption – shifting to ‘geotagged’ digital multimedia

Tape base systems are rapidly changing to digital forms. When digital multimedia is accepted, all sorts of enterprise information can be associated with that content. And for utility enterprises with geographically complex infrastructures, a computerised mapped organisation is simply obvious and intuitively accessed through Google Earth or similar digital maps.

Geotagging, sometimes referred to as Geocoding, is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as websites, RSS feeds, images, or video. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though it can also include altitude, bearing, place names, and other data.

Red Hen ‘spatial’ or geotagged multimedia solutions uniquely complement that commitment to this technical change. And it is this spatial indexing of video patrols that radically shifts the utility of the corridor visual inventory. Once spatialised as a set of map-indexed patrol pathways, the current and past conditions of the corridor landscape and its infrastructures can be shared and intuitively accessed across the organisation.

Patented intellectual property developed over a decade by Red Hen Systems spatially indexes or geo-codes the visual record at the time of the patrol. Importantly, Red Hen Systems endorses all emerging digital video recording standards. This ‘Spatial Multimedia’ is the timely union of digital media including still photography, motion video, stereo pairs, panoramic imagery sets, immersive media constructs, audio, and other data with location and date-time information from the GPS and other location designs.

Red Hen spatial multimedia ‘snap-it, map-it, share-it’ innovations provide an intuitive, interactive, tactile inspection of assets and their positions in time and space by displaying motion video with a moving cursor over a digital map.

This union of digital multimedia and spatial dexterity provides a solid foundation for geographically disperse asset management and timely decision support without incurring the expense associated with multiple on-site visits. Because the mapped multimedia content is available over a network, everyone in an organisation has simultaneous access to the rich store of information.

Leveraging camera innovations

With the digitalisation of technology within the digital cameras beyond true colour, unseen leaks and pending failures are revealed via infrared and multi-spectral filtered bandwidths, pin-pointing hydrocarbon leak detection. With the addition of gyro-stabilisation for helicopter use, clear imaging is readily available making the patrol even more effective and valuable.

Conclusions

Spatial media productions can have significant direct and indirect compensations. For example, having a visual and map indexed solution will allow remote experts and other corporate interests to: inspect for and evaluate infrastructure fatigue and displacement; direct and evaluate vegetation management treatments; enhance erosion detection and mitigation; enable ad-hoc inspections of current conditions within rights-of-way anywhere within the system; provide an ability to monitor change in designated areas of high consequence; and, to add visual references to corridor neighbour management and property relationships related to the potentially thousands of miles of corridor shorelines.

Rapid innovations in remote sensing cameras have allowed things that could not be seen to be pin-pointed. Pipeline and power corridors and their infrastructure can be rapidly and efficiently documented with digital media recording, permitting enterprise-wide review.

Tying multi-spectral stabilised camera advancements to spatialised digital data recorders can leverage in-situ patrol programs and budgets in new ways, making essentially dead-on-the shelf legacy tapes increasingly irrelevant to the enterprise.

Spatial multimedia and its mapped interface provides a new ease of access and a wider distribution of costly in-place programs while providing an enterprise-wide situational awareness of great merit.