Giordan, Daniele; Allasia, Paolo; Dematteis, Niccolo; Dell'Anese, Federico; Vagliasindi, Marco; Motta, Elena, 2016, A Low-Cost Optical Remote Sensing Application for Glacier Deformation Monitoring in an Alpine Environment, Sensors (Basel) 16 (2016). doi_10.3390/s16101750,
URL: http://www.cnr.it/prodotto/i/360779

In this work, we present the results of a low-cost optical monitoring station designed for monitoring the kinematics of glaciers in an Alpine environment. We developed a complete hardware/software data acquisition and processing chain that automatically acquires, stores and co-registers images. The system was installed in September 2013 to monitor the evolution of the Planpincieux glacier, within the open-air laboratory of the Grandes Jorasses, Mont Blanc massif (NW Italy), and collected data with an hourly frequency. The acquisition equipment consists of a high-resolution DSLR camera operating in the visible band. The data are processed with a Pixel Offset algorithm based on normalized cross-correlation, to estimate the deformation of the observed glacier. We propose a method for the pixel-to-metric conversion and present the results of the projection on the mean slope of the glacier. The method performances are compared with measurements obtained by GB-SAR, and exhibit good agreement. The system provides good support for the analysis of the glacier evolution and allows the creation of daily displacement maps.

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