Mauro Caprioli, Rosamaria Trizzino, 2016, EXPERIENCES OF UAV SURVEYS APPLIED TO CULTURAL HERITAGE AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISK MANAGEMENT, NEW ADVANCED GNSS and 3D SPATIAL TECHNIQUES_ APPLICATIONS to CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING, GEOPHYSICS, ARCHEOLOGY and CULTURAL HERITAGE, TRIESTE (Italy), 18 - 20 February 2016,
URL: http://www.cnr.it/prodotto/i/377792

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are emerging as a key engineering tool for future environmental survey tasks. In particular, the UAV survey techniques allow for a more detailed depiction of the characteristics of the cultural heritage of which our country is so rich. UAV aerial imagery offers both timely (on demand) and more detailed (higher resolution) information than comparable satellite imagery. In the present study the opportunities of obtaining more detailed documentation of cultural goods throughout UAV survey have been investigated. This paper presents the results of UAV surveys carried out in three areas of Apulia territory of great environmental concern. The first study area is an ancient Aragonese watchtower of the seventeenth century, located in the countryside of Polignano a Mare (Bari, Southern Italy). The surveys have been carried out with an "esacopter" equipped with a CANON EOS 550D camera. UAV-images data were processed using dedicated software (Agisoft Photoscan) and as a result, starting from 330 nadiral and inclined images, a cloud of 524.607 points with a 0.0100 m/pix resolution was obtained. The tower's model was extracted from the whole point cloud using ESRI ArcGIS 10.3 software. This kind of survey allowed highlighting some peculiarities of the tower that would not have been detectable with a terrestrial survey. In the 2nd study area several survey techniques and methodologies (Total Station and GNSS receivers, LiDAR and UAV photogrammetric surveys) applied to a limestone quarry have been compared in order to describe accuracies, precisions, precautions, operative difficulties and costs of each one. For each method different algorithms have been used in order to build the respective Digital Terrain Models (DTM). This analysis showed that the obtained DTMs are almost perfectly comparable. Finally, an UAV survey has been carried out along about 1 km of coast in the Salento peninsula (Lecce, Southern Italy). This area is affected by serious environmental risks due to the presence of dangerous rocky cliffs. The UAV platform was equipped with a photogrammetric measurement system that allowed obtaining a mobile mapping of the fractured fronts of dangerous rocky cliffs. The environmental information has been arranged in an ArcGIS platform in order to assess the risk levels. The experiences of UAV surveys carried out in this area confirmed that for inaccessible locations of dangerous rocky bodies the UAV survey coupled with GIS methodology proves to be a key engineering tool for the management of environmental risks.

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