Funded by the UK Space Agency’s International Partnership Space Programme (IPSP), the SAFIY project has enabled Deimos to work with the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in Dubai to automate the production of geospatial information designed to feed into the Smart Dubai initiative to aid urban planning and monitor urban change. SAFIY has automated the extraction of features such as roads, water, vegetation and buildings from high resolution Earth Observation (EO) data acquired by the Dubaisat-2 and Deimos-2 satellites.
The new data layers of buildings, road networks, bodies of water and areas of vegetation are updated frequently, in order to detect change and inform planning. The satellite data can be imported – and largely interpreted – automatically, resulting in reduced workloads, lower costs and increased efficiency compared with alternative methods.
Algorithms have been developed that can automatically identify various features, such as roundabouts, and distinguish between, for example, paved and unpaved roads.
