Fabio Giulio Tonolo

Polytechnic University of Turin | polito · DAD - Department of Architecture and Design

Historical landscapes in Italy have been slowly changing over the centuries and this is because their features, once fixed into specific shapes, were perpetuated until new economic and social developments occurred. Yet, in the Alpine region, this territorial organisation underwent sudden changes after World War II (WW II), resulting in a loss in po...

The recession of Alpine glaciers causes an increase in the extent of proglacial areas and leads to changes in the water discharge and sediment balance (morphodynamics and sediment transport). Although the processes occurring in proglacial areas are relevant not only from a scientific point of view but also for the purpose of climate change adaptati...

The eco-morphodynamic activity of large tropical rivers interacts with riparian vegetation causing implications for the carbon cycle within inland waters. Through a multi-temporal analysis of satellite data spanning the years 2000–2019, we analyzed rivers exceeding 200 m in width across the tropical regions, revealing a Carbon Pump mechanism drivin...

Historical landscapes in Italy have been changing slowly over the centuries since their features, once fixed in certain shapes, were perpetuated until new economic and social developments occurred. Yet, in the Alpine region, this territorial organization underwent sudden changes after WWII, resulting in a loss of population and traditional agropast...

The Pantanal biome is one of the most important wetlands on the planet, harboring a rich biodiversity whilst being critical in maintaining hydrological cycles and climate regulation. However, the occurrence of fires in the biome has represented a significant threat to this unique ecosystem and its multiple functions. Understanding the extent, inten...

The digitisation of museum exhibits has played an essential role in geomatics research for generating digital replicas, as it offers the chance to address rather challenging issues. The use of different sensors, ranging from active to passive, and also structured light scanners or hybrid solutions, the various destinations and purposes of the final...

The recession of Alpine glaciers causes an increase in the extent of proglacial areas that leads to changes in the water and sediment balance morphodynamics and sediment transport. Although the processes occurring in proglacial areas are relevant not only from a scientific point of view but also for the purpose of climate change adaptation, there i...

Over the next 30 years, temperatures are expected to increase in hot semi-arid zones. Despite increasing studies on urban heat, cooling measures suitable for this climate zone remain poorly investigated. The proposed method is innovative because it focuses on significant landscape metrics for determining the land surface temperature (LST) and evalu...

At present most alpine glaciers are not in equilibrium with the current climate, as a result they are undergoing a dramatic mass loss. Monitoring glacial variations is crucial to assess the consequences of climate change on the territory. In this work different geomatics techniques are exploited to measure and monitor the Rutor glacier over the yea...

The launch of the new iPad Pro by Apple in March 2020 generated high interest and expectations for different reasons; nevertheless, one of the new features that developers and users were interested in testing was the LiDAR sensor integrated into this device (and, later on, in the iPhone 12 and 13 Pro series). The implications of using this technolo...

Thanks to the latest technological developments LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) sensors are no longer an exclusive feature of manned airborne platforms but they are close to becoming a commercial solution in the UAS (Uncrewed Aerial Systems) domain. The release on the market of the Zenmuse L1 by DJI (Dà-Jiāng Innovations) is a step further in t...

In the last few years, notable progress has been made in the field of non-invasive diagnostic for the monitoring of heritage assets. In particular, multispectral imagery (more specifically thermal images will be addressed in this manuscript) allows investigations in the non-visible range of the electro-magnetic spectrum to be effectively carried ou...

Low-cost and fast surveying approaches are increasingly being deployed in several domains, including in the field of built heritage documentation. In parallel with mobile mapping systems, uncrewed aerial systems, and simultaneous location and mapping systems, 360° cameras and spherical photogrammetry are research topics attracting significant inter...

Heavy rain between the 2nd and 3rd of October 2020 severely affected the area of Limone Piemonte, Piemonte Region (Italy). The consequence of those two days of rain was a flood that, starting from the hamlet of Limonetto severely damaged the areas close to the riverbed of the Vermegnana river and the related hydrographyc network. A synergistic mult...

The main goal of this ongoing research is the evaluation of the iPad Pro built-in LiDAR sensor for large scale 3D rapid mapping. Different aspects have been considered from the architectural surveying perspective and several analyses were carried out focusing on the acquisition phase and the definition of best practices for data collection, the qua...

The combination of thermographic and geometric recording has always been an issue for architectural heritage diagnostic investigations. Multidisciplinary projects often require integrating multi-sensor information—including metric and temperature data—to extract valid conclusions regarding the state-of-preservation of historical buildings. Towards...

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is nowadays a standard approach in several application fields. Researches connected with these systems cover several topics and the evolution of these platforms and their applications are rapidly growing. Despite the high level of automatization reached nowadays, there is still a phase of the overall UAVs'...

The recent developments of passive sensors techniques, that have been able to take advantage of the technological innovations related to sensors technical features, sensor calibration, the use of UAV systems (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), the integration of image matching techniques and SfM (Structure from Motion) algorithms, enable to exploit both the...

The authors group is within the Glacier Lab of Politecnico di Torino (part of the CC-LAB, a laboratory for climate change monitoring), which is working on glacier monitoring since 2016, mainly exploiting Geomatics techniques to measure the extent and to model the surface of glaciers over the years. Measurement campaigns were carried out within the...

The estimate of External Orientation (E.O.) parameters for a block of images is a crucial step in the photogrammetric pipeline and the most demanding in terms of required time and human effort, both during the fieldwork and post-processing phases. Different researchers developed strategies to minimize the impact of this phase. Despite the achieveme...

In Sahelian Africa, rural centers have been hit by catastrophic floods for many years. In order to prevent the impact of flooding, the flood-prone areas and the settlement dynamics within them must be identified. The aim of this study is to ascertain the floodplain settlement dynamics in the Maouri valley (135 km 2) in the municipality of Guéchémé,...

This essay describes rapid mapping activities based on satellite imagery and it is focused on earthquake damage assessment carried out by the Rapid Mapping component of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS). In the introduction section the potentials of satellite sensors, especially the very-high resolution optical ones, in providing v...

Remotely sensed data can provide the basis for timely and efficient building damage maps that are of fundamental importance to support the response activities following disaster events. However, the generation of these maps continues to be mainly based on the manual extraction of relevant information in operational frameworks. Considering the ident...

The European Union and the European Space Agency (EU/ESA) have promoted since 1998 (Baveno Manifesto*) the GMES Programme (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security), nowadays called Copernicus (www.copernicus.eu). In the water quality domain, the use of Copernicus Sentinel missions and services improvements occur studying chlorophyll-a (Chl-a...

Satellite-based Emergency Mapping (SEM) mechanisms provide information for emergency response in relation to different types of disasters, including tsunamis, based on the analysis of satellite imagery acquired in the aftermath of an event. One of the main critical aspects of a SEM service is the timeliness in providing relevant information in the...

Traffic (or road) signs are an important component for applications in the mobility domain. When integrated with a road network, traffic signs, e.g. speed limits, restricted access, breakthrough prohibition signs, provide information that can be exploited in determining impedances, travel times and routing options. Additionally, the availability of...

UAVs platform are increasingly deployed by first responders and local stakeholders to get a first overview of disaster affected areas with a high level of detail and different off-nadir angle configurations. Through a rapid mapping approach, the acquired data (video sequences or pictures) are analysed to extract information on damages to buildings...

Figure from the paper

Damage assessment from very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing imagery plays a fundamental role in the delineation of the impact caused by catastrophic events. To date internationally accepted standard guidelines on how to assess damages to building using vertical imagery have not yet been developed. This study therefore proposes a building damag...

This paper investigates the potential of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) interferometry in the field of emergency mapping, assessing its suitability for both rapid mapping, aimed at supporting the immediate response phase after a disastrous event, and risk mapping, addressing risk prevention and mitigation activities. The conventional Differential I...

This chapter focuses on the emergency mapping activities generally carried out to support the immediate response to flood events, mainly describing the role of satellite data. An introduction on emergency mapping is provided, presenting the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS), the emergency mapping service provided by the European Union (...

Over the past 15 years, scientists and disaster responders have increasingly used satellite-based Earth observations for global rapid assessment of disaster situations. We review global trends in satellite rapid response and emergency mapping from 2000 to 2014, analyzing more than 1000 incidents in which satellite monitoring was used for assessing...

Exploiting the decrease of costs related to UAV technology, the humanitarian community started piloting the use of similar systems in humanitarian crises several years ago in different application fields, i.e., disaster mapping and information gathering, community capacity building, logistics and even transportation of goods. Part of the author's g...

In recent years an increasing number of extreme meteorological events have been recorded. Geomatics techniques have been historically adopted to support the different phases of the Emergency Management cycle with a main focus on emergency response, initial recovery and preparedness through the acquisition, processing, management and dissemination o...

In recent years, due to an increasing number of extreme meteorological events potentially related to climate change, a growing attention has been paid to the operational use of satellite remote sensing applied to emergency management applications. This is mainly due to the large and timely availability of different types of remotely sensed data—as...

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Haiti was hit by a devastating earthquake on 12 January 2010. The immediate response to the disaster was a real turning point concerning the availability, dissemination and licensing of a huge quantity of geospatial data. Timely triggering of the Earth Observation satellites, and absence of cloud cover, allowed to acquire very high-resolution optic...

In the archaeological area of Augusta Bagiennorum different tests have been performed since 1990, in order to support the archaeological scientists using geomatics techniques. Photogrammetric aerial surveys (both helicopter and aircraft platforms were used) for large scale mapping, implementation of Geographic Information System devoted to archaeol...

Among the major natural disasters that occurred in 2010, the Haiti earthquake was a real turning point concerning the availability, dissemination and licensing of a huge quantity of geospatial data. In a few days several map products based on the analysis of remotely sensed data-sets were delivered to users. This demonstrated the need for reliable...

Haiti was hit by a devastating earthquake on 12 January 2010. Timely triggering of the Earth Observation satellites, and absence of cloud cover, allowed to acquire very high-resolution satellite imagery over the main affected areas within a few hours of the disaster. ITHACA performed a first damage assessment based on remotely sensed data, to suppo...

Risk reduction and disaster respond experts working on flood related issues could greatly benefit from the availability of information such as the real extent of past flood events and the monitoring of flood extent during ongoing events. To respond to the afore mentioned needs, ITHACA is developing a tool devoted to the automated detection of flood...

Satellite images and GIS procedures are key elements for emergency management, especially in case of events hitting developing countries, more vulnerable to calamities and less prepared to face them. This article aims to show the procedure applied for the production of a cartography of flooded areas during the early impact phase; these activities a...

This paper is focused on two main topics: crime scene reconstruction, based on a geomatic approach, and crime scene analysis, through GIS based procedures. According to the experience of the authors in performing forensic analysis for real cases, the aforesaid topics will be examined with the specific goal of verifying the relationship of human wal...

The main objective of early impact analysis after a disaster is to produce georeferenced data about the affected areas, in support of humanitarian action. Crucial information are the identification of the hitten areas and the estimation of the number of people involved. Satellite imageries are mainly used as input data for early impact analysis at...

The availability of high resolution satellite images (HRSI) is introducing a new challenge in the mapping environment. Imagery coming from high resolution satellites such as QuickBird, Ikonos, Eros-Al or the new Orbview-3, is likely to become in the next years a powerful tool to derive topographic maps as well as a comprehending medium at large sca...

The availability of high-resolution satellite images could be exploited for upgrading geographic databases at medium scales (1:5,000-1:25,000) as alternative to aerial photogrammetry. The paper presents a procedure to carry out this task which is based on an automatic image-to-image registration procedure of new satellite data to existing ortho-pho...

Satellite images and GIS procedures are key elements for emergency management, especially in case of events hitting developing countries, more vulnerable to calamities and less prepared to face them. This article aims to show the procedure applied for the production of a cartography of flooded areas during the early impact phase; these activities a...

The ITHACA project ( Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action ) has the main goal to carry on operational and research activitie s in the field of geomatics for analysis, evaluatio n and mitigation of natural and manmade hazards. The project has been developed within an association founded by Politecni co di Torino...

In this paper an innovative procedure based on satellite data aimed at the daily monitoring of snow covers is shown. Snow mapping is required to verify accessibility to those areas interested by catastrophic events. This need was expressed by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). The research was developed within a collaboration agreement be...

1. ABSTRACT The lack of adequate maps is one of the critical issue to deal with in the developing countries. Some technical projects involving the environment and the land planning need correct and updated maps. Several test had been conducted by our research group to develop a possible approach for low cost map and ortho-image production. This met...

In this last year, two huge National programmes have been launched in Italy; both programmes regard remotely sensed images used for disaster prevention, monitoring and assessment. These projects take into account all kind of remotely sensed data (both from geometric and spectral point of view), but particular attention should be paid to high geomet...

La correzione geometrica di immagini satellitari può essere affrontata utilizzando metodi non parametrici, ovvero generalizzati, che permettono di determinare una relazione tra le coordinate immagine e le coordinate terreno. Nel presente articolo vengono illustrati due differenti metodi non parametrici: i polinomi razionali e le reti neurali. Per i...