Research and development (R&D)
Advancing InSAR capabilities through collaboration
Ground Evolution Monitoring maintains active research programmes to advance InSAR technology and its applications. We welcome collaboration with universities, research institutes, and industry partners who share our interest in pushing the boundaries of what radar remote sensing can achieve.
Our research heritage
GEM was founded by researchers from Imperial College London's Geotechnics Section and the Engineering Scale Geology Research Group, with decades of combined experience in InSAR development and application.
Our team has published extensively on satellite and drone InSAR, contributed to major infrastructure monitoring programmes, and developed novel hardware and software solutions for challenging monitoring applications.
This research foundation shapes everything we do - our commercial services draw directly on capabilities developed through rigorous academic investigation.
R&D informs our in-house software, which provides vastly improved data recovery using distributed scatterers as well as persistent scatterers, and corrects the former for the effects of vegetation phenology and soil changes; this extends the use of time-series InSAR to rural environments, common across the UK.
Collaboration opportunities
We are open to research partnerships across a range of formats.
Joint research projects with universities and research institutes allow us to tackle fundamental challenges in radar remote sensing and geotechnical monitoring.
Industry collaborations enable us to apply our capabilities to new sectors and application areas, developing solutions tailored to specific operational requirements.
We can participate in consortium bids for research funding and contribute to doctoral training programmes.
What we are looking for
We are particularly interested in collaborations that address practical challenges in ground and structural monitoring.
This includes improving InSAR performance in difficult environments, developing faster and more automated processing workflows, integrating InSAR with complementary sensing technologies, and extending applications to new sectors and asset types.
We value partners who combine technical excellence with a focus on real-world impact.
Current research interests
We continue to develop our drone radar system, working toward operational repeat-pass InSAR for high-resolution deformation monitoring.
We are advancing processing techniques for challenging environments - vegetated terrain, coastal zones, and areas with complex atmospheric conditions - where conventional InSAR approaches struggle to deliver reliable results.
We are exploring machine learning approaches to automate feature detection and anomaly identification in large InSAR datasets.
We are investigating the integration of InSAR with other monitoring technologies to provide comprehensive ground characterisation.
We have developed one of the world’s first drone radar systems for improved spatial and temporal data resolutions in InSAR monitoring. Here, the system is imaging the Old Oak Common HS2 construction site.
What we bring
Collaborators benefit from our in-house InSAR processing software, our drone radar hardware and operational expertise, our extensive experience in geotechnical applications, and our network of contacts across the infrastructure, energy, and environmental sectors.
We offer a bridge between academic research and commercial application - helping to translate novel techniques into operational tools and providing real-world test cases for emerging methods.
Get in touch
If you are interested in research collaboration, please contact us to discuss opportunities.
We are happy to explore joint funding applications, commissioned research, data sharing arrangements, or other partnership formats that align with mutual interests.
Whether you are an academic researcher seeking industry engagement or a commercial organisation looking to develop new monitoring capabilities, we would welcome a conversation about how we might work together.