Collaborating Organisation Overview
The Urban Monitor project is a partnership between CSIRO and the Western Australian Government land and water management agencies. Collectively, the partners bring together expertise in remote sensing, natural resource management, planning and conservation.
Project Overview
The Urban Monitor initiative, through the use of advanced technologies, will allow government agencies and researchers to track changes to urban environments at unprecedented levels. This includes vegetation clearing, urban in-fill, and changes in roof colours to predict urban hot-spots.
The project involves taking high resolution digital aerial photographs over the Perth metropolitan area, a process that takes several days. Due to the different times of the day, variations in aircraft angle, colour variations and different weather conditions throughout the process, these photographs must be processed to merge them into a single image of Perth.
Project Challenge
The tens of thousands of images produced when using aerial photography of the Perth metropolitan area are terabytes in size. This data set is too large to be processed on a standard desktop computer or workstation.
iVEC’s Solution
With the assistance of an iVEC Industry and Government Uptake grant, CSIRO is developing software that can process all the images together. The software is being developed and tested on iVEC supercomputers using high resolution digital aerial photographs acquired by CSIRO.
Environmental Outcome
The project will enable improved understanding of trends in urban assets and land uses at an unprecedented scale and accuracy. This will enable improved land and water management by government and urban water utilities.
