Annual Workshop and Annual Meeting

Prof. Ana Cláudia Teodoro, University of Porto

"The Potentialities of Sentinel 2 Data for environmental risk prevention and disaster management"

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Copernicus is an European Union (EU) Programme aimed at developing European information services based on satellite Earth Observation (EO) and also in situ data. A large number of global data retrieved from satellite and ground-based platforms, airborne and seaborne measurement systems are available to produce information and help service providers, public authorities and several international organizations, improving this way the general well-being of individuals and societies of European and worldwide regions. The Copernicus services are freely and openly accessible to its users and is served by a set of dedicated satellites (the Sentinel families) coupled with the so-called contributing missions (the current commercial and public satellites).
The information provided by the Copernicus services can be used by end users for a wide range of applications in a variety of areas. These include urban area management, sustainable development and nature protection, regional and local planning, agriculture, forestry and fisheries, health, civil protection, infrastructure, transport and mobility. Several practical examples of the applications of Sentinel 2 data in the risk prevention and in the disaster management will be focused. Subjects as forest fires, floods and coastal erosion will be highlighted.
 

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Prof. Cidália Fonte, Universidade de Coimbra
"Adding value to existing VGI - Two case studies" 

 

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) of many types is collected in a wide variety of projects with very diverse objectives. This creates enormous amounts of data, some of which are available for download or can be accessible by APIs. Two projects will be described in this presentation, that aim to add value to available VGI by either processing the existing data or integrating diverse sources of data, enabling the creation of additional information. The first project is an application created to convert automatically the data available in OpenStreetMap into a Land Use Land Cover Map. The second project involves the creation of a platform that aggregates several sources of VGI, allowing queries to be performed by geographical location simultaneously in all considered data sources. Applications of both platforms are presented and future developments highlighted.
 

Prof. José António Tenedório, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, CICS.NOVA

Dr. Luis Marques, CICS.NOVA & CPSV-UPC

"How can 3D models and augmented reality visualization based on mobile platforms enhance the value of urban heritage?"

The built heritage is a fundamental element of the public space. It is part of the memory of places; it is the history of places represented materially and often-beautiful iconic city landmark. For these reasons, among others, cities that preserve this built heritage with intrinsic rare value are highly pursued by the tourism industry, because they constitute financial profit and economic growth. These sources of income are frequently a factor in balancing public finances and support this urban inherency. Today, the diversity of mobile platforms providing access onsite to real-time geographic information and the possibility of supporting APPs based on Augmented Reality enable, what we can call, the expansion of public space and their cultural heritage value. The APPs can be understood as dematerialized extension of the public space and their cultural/historical value. The recreation of the public space with heritage value (physical and limited) gives place to the virtual/mixed public space, leading to what we can call social smart virtualization (an intergenerational interaction in the combination of paper maps or other objects, with unlimited virtual information, supported on mobile platforms) and as a consequence increases also the "ubiquity of cities". The development of 3D models of urban objects implanted in public space, using land surveys and UAV, and its incorporation in APPs for the conceptualization of mixed reality environments, enhance the value of urban heritage and promote the virtualization of cities. This idea will support the demonstration of the prototype Lx_W APP, developed for the Águas Livres Aqueduct System in Lisbon; aqueduct that is one of the most important landmarks of the Portuguese capital.

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Prof. Fernando Soares, Universidade de Lisboa

 

The protection of harbours in coastal areas, that are exposed to the action of the sea waves, is made by breakwaters. During the phase of design of new breakwaters, or the rehabilitation of existing ones, the effectiveness of the shape and of the protective elements, aiming the harbour safeness, is evaluated on 3D scale models, built inside wave basins or wave flumes. In the testing phase, water waves are generated and the resulting impact on the breakwater model is periodically monitored and evaluated, to study the hydraulic and structural behaviour under predefined sea-wave conditions. The proposed presentation describes a point cloud vs image based technique, developed to estimate the displacements of the blocks of concrete, which are part of protection layer of rouble-mound breakwater models. The combination of registered 3D point cloud data with digital image data is a key factor to achieve competitive results with the ones obtained by the current standard methods. The most relevant outcome is the quantification of block’s true displacement (geometric centre 3D locations), as well as axis angular variations, at consecutive instants of the event.

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Ing. Roberto Capua, RLD – Ricerca e Laboratorio Digitale

"High Precision GNSS Surveying: state of the art and future perspectives"
 

High Precision GNSS is today commonly used in Cadastral Application and Mapping. The State of the art of High Precision GNSS involves the implementation  and maintenance of Local and Regional Network of GNSS Reference Receivers, with inter-distances in the order of 70 Km (Network RTK-Real Time Kinematics, techniques). Such Networks are commonly managed by Land Administration or Geodetic Authorities. They are also used for Geodetic Reference Systems Realization and can be considered as part of a the Spatial Data Infrastructure. Relevant implementation and maintenance costs, are sometimes a blocking factor for the development of High Precision techniques. New techniques (e.g.  PPP-RTK, Precise Point Positioning RTK) are promising global and regional solutions, with the need of very sparse monitoring network of receivers (with inter-distances of hundred/thousand km). Furthermore, the availability of multiple GNSS constellations (e.g. GLONASS and the incoming Galileo) are going to provide higher availability in urban areas and reducing the initial time to convergence to cm level position (currently in the order of tenths of seconds for Local solution and tenths of minutes for PPP) through multiple frequencies signals. Most of the applications with a relevant spatial and geographical content are today requiring more and more High Precision positioning and reliability. Automatic driving is one of the most relevant examples. High resolution and high precision cartography are therefore needed. Such a particular Spatial Data Infrastructure Infrastructure have to be implemented as soon as possible and can be boosted by the economy of scale that automotive and transport applications can create in the receivers sectors. This will have an impact on surveyors work. Innovative and more efficient workflows and procedures will have to be developed in order to exploit such innovations. An analysis of current techniques strength and weakness and future perspectives of High Precision GNSS positioning will be presented in this work.

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Prof. José A. Gonçalves and André Pinhal

"Precise mobile mapping with action cameras"

Mobile mapping systems based on video cameras operated in vehicles are important geospatial data
sources of traffic signs and other features around roads. They are normally based on sophisticated
positioning systems, integrating inertial navigation units, with precise time synchronization. This
paper presents an alternative system, based on an action camera (Gopro Hero-5). Although the
camera incorporates GPS positioning, it is used only for time synchronization, since precise
positioning is derived from a single frequency GNSS receiver. The complete system is a block unit,
with less than 1 kg, and an overall cost below 1000 euros. It is mounted on the car wing mirror, with
an angle of 20 to 30 degrees with respect to the car trajectory. The paper analyses calibration issues of this system, in particular camera calibration, relative positioning of camera and GNSS antenna and time synchronization of the video. The system can be used in order to manually obtain 3D coordinates of objects in consecutive frames or, alternatively, to extract a point cloud through structure from motion methods. This approach allows to complete missing GPS positions which occur in built-up areas and to provide a point cloud with reasonable detail of objects around roads. Accuracy of 10 to 20 cm was found for a set of check points.
The operation of the system does not require technical expertise. Many units can be operated in
different cars, in order to do a collaborative mapping for road surveys, provided that legal issues are
taken into account. These aspects of the system are discussed in the paper.

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Prof. Dr. Rahmi Nurhan ÇELİK, Department of Geomatic Engineering, Istanbul Technical University

"Contribution of Internet of Things to Volunteered Geographic Information"

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Industry 4.0 and also Internet of Things (IoT) were firstly pronounced in 2011 in Hannover Fair/Germany. That was almost a new road for manufacturing industry. And that was also a declaration for new life style. This revolution is different than 1st, 2nd and 3rd industrial revolutions. That was declared before its starting. In other words this revolution was named at the beginning rather than its completion. According to the design principles of Industry 4.0, the main target of the idea is the manufacturing industry. However, when the idea was raised not only in the manufacturing industry, it is adopted by many other industries, professional disciplines and even individuals. And hence new products, applications and etc. was began to be developed in many other areas. Therefore it can be emphasized here that from the smallest size to the largest, it accelerates all areas. So the idea goes far beyond this. The Geospatial industry is one of these industries. In this talk a discussion is to be raised on the contribution of internet of things to geospatial industry and hence to VGI. In addition, future perspectives will be tried to be portrayed according to the expectations of new generations.