Land Displacement Monitoring (LDM)

Land Displacement Monitoring (LDM) is Synspective's InSAR analytics service for detecting and tracking ground deformation over wide areas. Measuring subsidence, uplift and landslide risk with conventional surveys such as levelling, GNSS sensors, drones and helicopters takes time and staff, and is limited to places that can be reached on site. LDM instead applies interferometric SAR (InSAR) analysis to satellite radar data, which is collected at night and in any weather, to detect vertical ground displacement in millimetres and to observe subsidence and deformation periodically. Synspective's published LDM results are processed from ESA's Copernicus Sentinel radar data, and the company states the service also uses data from JAXA's ALOS-2. With ALOS-2 data, results update approximately three times a year; Synspective states that adding ALOS-4 data will raise this to up to 20 times a year in Japan. Synspective says LDM combines InSAR, AI and cloud technologies to enable automated processes and quick alert dispatch over anomalous deformation.

Customers review displacement maps and time series in Synspective's cloud-based visualisation platform. An API lets third-party applications access monitoring results, retrieve an automatic summary for each area of interest (average and total displacement, number of persistent scatterer points, available dates) and trigger analyses. A patent-pending subsidence-area extraction feature and a precursor-point algorithm highlight places where movement is starting to accelerate.

Synspective names road, tunnel and railway construction, construction management, ports and airports, dikes and seawalls, and dams, power, oil, gas and mining as applications. Published projects include a World Bank- and NDRRMA-supervised assessment of over 400 km² of slopes in the Melamchi river basin, Nepal; a JICA pilot in Guatemala City covering more than 1.4 million measurement points, which found three potential subsidence risk locations that survey agencies had not recognised; and a road-maintenance demonstration with Fukuoka City.