SWIFTDetect

SWIFTDetect is a web-based encroachment and change-detection monitoring platform from Swift Geospatial, a GIS and satellite-monitoring company based in Pretoria, South Africa. It addresses a problem facing owners of servitudes, sites and linear infrastructure such as power lines, pipelines, roads and railways: unauthorised construction, informal settlement and other surface change are slow and costly to find through field visits and paper-based reporting, and expensive to resolve once established.

Users register, upload their areas of interest and choose a monitoring frequency (daily, weekly, biweekly or monthly). The system collects Planet PlanetScope imagery (3 m, 8-band, daily revisit) over each area, runs a change-detection analysis and reports alerts, and the dashboard updates automatically with the latest imagery and analytics. Higher-resolution imagery can be added from Planet SkySat (50 cm) or Vantor (archive or new tasking at 15 cm HD, 30 cm or 50 cm), and free Sentinel-2 imagery (10 m) is offered for coarser analyses. The platform has map, analysis, monitoring and report pages with time sliders, layer toggles and downloadable, customisable reports, and it is REST API compatible for linking into existing systems. Imagery can also be ordered through it without analysis.

Swift Geospatial positions SWIFTDetect for government (encroachment management and compliance), NGOs (remote monitoring of areas worldwide), commercial asset owners (infrastructure protection) and insurers, who use it to verify and backdate claims, task new imagery, map the footprint of storms, floods or fires and assess the resulting damage, and map location-based risk for underwriting. Add-on services include in-field surveys, time-series analyses, automated fire detection, dwelling counts, high-resolution base mapping and land-cover classification. Pricing is quoted per project, based on the area monitored, the imagery resolution and the update frequency.