Monitoring of the Road Infrastructure Using Remote Sensing and Voice-Activated Technology

Participants: ASDE, ReSAC, Voice-Insight Ltd., NBT, Progeo

Considering the importance of the information related to the road infrastructure, the Bulgarian administration is launching a project implemented by ReSAC and partners for data collection using modern technologies. The main aim of the project is the create geodatabase of the transport corridors, using satellite data and additional field inspections. The data suppliers were SPOT Image (SPOT 5), EUSI (IKONOS) and Eurimage (QuickBird). The project will be finalized in the end of 2006.

The scope of the project is to propose a test prototype that would demonstrate the possibilities of achieving a leapfrog improvement in the planning and monitoring of the road infrastructure of the European transport corridors by using remote sensing data and complementary technology called VQL. The main aim is to complement the more traditional field inspections with satellite monitoring of road infrastructure and voice technology to allow collecting data on the field with high performance and reliability.

This proposal is in accordance to the following main initiatives:

• Development of the Trans-European Networks (TEN) and the introduction of the European standards in all transport sub-sectors;
• Creation of actual and reliable geodatabase for the road network as part of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure in accordance to GMES initiatives and the directives of INSPIRE “Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe”;
• Implementation of Decision of the Bulgarian Council of Ministers No. 761 from 24.09.2004 for the establishment of common geodatabase for territory, population and resources of Bulgaria.

These voice enabled field inspections are necessary and complementary activity to the monitoring and data collection of the road infrastructure using satellite images. Very high-resolution satellite data has the ability to provide actual information of the land cover/land use along the road. However it has a limited resolution for capture and properly identify single objects less than 0.6 meters. In those cases when the information from the satellite is not enough, field inspection with voice-enabled Tablet PC, containing images and graphical data, will provide and manage the data in efficient and consistent manner.

This system could provide enough information for strategic decision-making, related to the maintenance of the road network and the financial planning for these tasks. Using these technologies, the creation of a dossier for the road will be much faster and for much less budget, than the traditional surveying. In addition the data collected on the field could be used for validation of the result from the image interpretation.

The project is implemented by ReSAC (Bulgaria), Voice-Insight Ltd. (Belgium), New Bulgarian Technologies (Bulgaria) and Progeo (Bulgaria).