Land Administration & Mapping
Case study

Managing urban growth and change from space.

Combining 3D models with very-high-resolution satellite imagery to help prevent flooding in overcrowded cities.

Your challenge.

Booming population growth and a shortage of planned affordable housing are forcing millions of people into unauthorized dwellings. Rapid urbanisation and overpopulation disrupt the natural drainage patterns of the land, causing potentially dangerous waterlogging and flooding.

In sprawling and ever-changing cities, there’s no way for land administration professionals to be everywhere at once, making it difficult to monitor urban growth, detect unauthorised building work and decide when development activity begins to put people at risk. Urban managers need information which can help catch developers in breach of regulations, streamline planning processes and hold organisations to account.

Deimos Imaging satellite data is used to create accurate and cost-effective maps and 3D models to help you monitor flood risk, assess the stability of terrain and, crucially, identify where it’s safe to build – and where it isn’t.

Our approach.

By capturing images of locations over time and using different satellites with a range of resolutions, Deimos Imaging gives you the imagery you need to monitor urban sprawl and track the progress of development in near real time. Overlaying Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) with very-high-resolution satellite imagery will help reveal insights about flood risk as a result of urban development.

Understanding urban sprawl over time.

We co-ordinated Deimos-1 and Deimos-2 with satellites in the LANDSAT series to get a seamless analysis of urban sprawl in Hyderabad over several decades.

Deimos Imaging imagery from 2011 and 2017 was used alongside LANDSAT imagery from 1988 and 1999.

Analysing the images in detail revealed how the city had changed over 29 years.

We pinpointed new infrastructure such as the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, the Outer Ring Road around the city and new urban growth in the western metropolitan area.

Evaluating at-risk areas with Digital Elevation Modelling.

Because it can capture two images at a time from different angles, Deimos-2's imagery can be used to create 3D elevation models called DEMs. These show a location's geography and elevation, as well as bodies of water: useful for measuring the size, length and slope of drainage networks and basins.

Revealing flood risk with DEM and imagery.

Analysing a city's Digital Elevation Model (DEM) based on very-high-resolution imagery can reveal areas where the city’s natural drainage has been blocked, increasing the flood risk. In addition, DEMs can be used to simulate water level scenarios and estimate the potential extent of flood damage.

Key Benefits

Spot at-risk areas early on.

Analysing Digital Elevation Models based on very-high-resolution imagery can help you detect areas with unstable terrain or a high risk of flooding.

Identify individual buildings.

Our virtual constellation includes more than 20 satellites with 1 metre or better resolution, which can be used to detect small-scale changes such as individual houses or buildings.