Monitoring of gas transmission pipelines – a customer driven civil UAV application

Abstract

It is in the interest of any gas company to maintain the value of its pipelines and to protect them effectively against damage caused by third parties. As a result of global progress in high-resolution remote sensing and image processing technology, it is now possible to design natural gas pipeline monitoring systems with remote sensors and context-oriented image processing software. Recent developments in UAV technology show their suitability as platforms for such customer driven missions [1,2]. Two different scenarios for a UAV based gas pipeline monitoring system will be discussed