Aerial Colour Infrared (CIR) image of riparian vegetation, houses and the sprinkler distribution impacts on lawn health on an irrigated oval on the upper Swan River, Perth.

Urban monitor: enabling unprecedented monitoring, planning and management of urban land and water

The Urban Monitor project will integrate the terabytes of high resolution airborne data with other data to create new capabilities in monitoring changes in the environment.

• 7 March 2008 | Updated 14 October 2011

• Project summary
• Current activities
• Partners
• Project outcomes

Project summary

The Urban Monitor project aims to provide high performance segmentation and three-dimensional (3D)reconstruction using digital aerial images in urban and peri-urban environments.

Using the Perth, Western Australia (WA), metropolitan area and its surrounds as a case study, the Urban Monitor project is a partnership between CSIRO and Western Australian water and land agencies.

Current activities

The project team is developing methods for the correction, mosaicking and radiometric calibration of the tens of thousands of image frames produced when using aerial photography of the Perth metropolitan area.

At 10 cm resolution the collection of digital photographs is terabytes in size.

Project outcomes

The outcomes of the project will include:

• Improved understanding of trends in urban assets and land uses at an unprecedented scale and accuracy. This will enable:
  • the early detection of problems
  • better evaluation of public programs
  • improved land and water management by government and urban water utilities.
    
    
• Improved river and wetland foreshore management through:
  • identifying trends in urban vegetation (to link with public intervention programs and broader environmental pressures such as climate change)
  • the identification of high-water-use and irrigation efficiencies that can be targeted with water demand management programs
  • better estimation of urban storm flows from newly urbanised areas (as a result of changes to impervious surfaces).
    
    
• Showcasing the use of advanced computing resources for generating information from terabyte-magnitude data volumes.

Partners

The partners involved are:

• WA Department of Environment and Conservation
• WA Department of Water
• Swan Catchment Council, Western Australia
• WA Water Corporation
• WA Land Information System (WALIS)
• Landgate
• Swan River Trust
• Bontanic Gardens and Parks Authority (WA)
• WA Department of Agriculture and Food
• WA Department for Planning and Infrastructure.

The project is also supported by the iVEC Industry and Government Uptake grants scheme.

iVEC promotes the use and uptake by industry and government of high-performance computing (HPC), visualisation and large-scale data storage within WA.

iVEC, supported by the WA Government, is a joint venture between:

• CSIRO
• Central TAFE, Perth, WA
• Curtin University of Technology, WA
• the University of Western Australia
• Murdoch University, WA.

Read more about our work in Putting remote sensing on the map.