Sara Zollini
Fixed-term university researcher at the Department of Civil, Construction-Architectural and Environmental Engineering (DICEAA) of University of L'Aquila in Topography and Cartography (S.S.D. ICAR/06), SC 08/A4 - Geomatics. In 2021 she obtained the European PhD in Civil, Construction-Architectural and Environmental Engineering at University of L'Aquila, spending a period as a PhD visiting student for 6 months at CTTC (Centre Tecnològic Telecomunicacions Catalunya) in Castelldefels, Barcelona, dealing with the processing of SAR and optical data for the study of coastal areas. Subsequently, she was a research fellow at the DICEAA. She currently is the professor holder the course Elements of topography and cartography of Construction-Architectural Engineering and collaborates in teaching activities for topography and geomatics courses of Civil and Environmental Engineering and for the course in Civil protection techniques and territorial security at the UNIVAQ, DICEAA. She is topography and geomatics subject expert . She is co-supervisor of degree theses in the same field. Shee participates in projects of national and international interest, organizes and actively participates in national and international conferences related to the Geomatics field. She won the IEEE-GRS29-CNI-SI 2021 award for the 3 best PhD theses in geosciences and remote sensing and is member of journal editorial boards.
Sessions
Over the last decades, remote sensing techniques have contributed to supporting cultural
heritage studies and management, including archaeological sites as well as their territorial context and
geographical surroundings. This paper aims to investigate the capabilities and limitations of the new
hyperspectral sensor PRISMA (Precursore IperSpettrale della Missione Applicativa) by the Italian
Space Agency (ASI), still little applied to archaeological studies. The PRISMA sensor was tested on
Italian terrestrial (Alba Fucens, Massa D’Albe, L’Aquila) and marine (Sinuessa, Mondragone, Caserta)
archaeological sites. A comparison between PRISMA hyperspectral imagery and the well-known
Sentinel-2 Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) was performed in order to better understand features and
outputs useful to investigate the aforementioned areas. At first, bad bands analysis and noise removal
were performed, in order to delete the numerically corrupted bands. Principal component analysis
(PCA) was carried out to highlight invisible details in the original image; then, spectral signatures of
representative areas were extracted and compared to Sentinel-2 data. At last, a classification analysis
(ML and SAM) was performed both on PRISMA and Sentinel-2 imagery. The results showed a full
agreement between Sentinel and PRISMA data, enhancing the capability of PRISMA in extrapolating
more spectral information and providing a better reliability in the extraction of the features.
these first analyses, applied in landscape archaeology studies, highlight
the great spectral operational capabilities of the PRISMA sensor. In future studies, a great
advantage can be brought by performing a reliable pansharpening in order to increase
the resolution of the final images (geometric resolution from pancromathic and spectral
resolution from hyperspectral data), as well as a more stable multitemporal acquisition in
the areas under investigation.
Inspection and maintenance of structures and infrastructures are, nowadays, hot topics. Extreme weather events and ageing stock, mainly, deteriorate the network infrastructure. Their structural performance should be checked periodically, but this is not always possible, both because of the difficulty to practically carry it out and because, sometimes, insufficient funds are allocated to infrastructure management. In most of the western countries, a highly percentage of bridges, roads, viaducts were built between the 1950s and the 1970s, so the detection plays a fundamental role for their proper functioning. Traditionally, instruments such as levels and total stations have been used to perform high accuracy Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). These can provide highly reliable real-time data on structural condition but, both because of economic reasons and of the difficult-to-access areas, not all the structures and infrastructure can be monitored with traditional techniques. Remote sensing can provide numerous advantages for structures and infrastructures monitoring, because the information can be extracted “from distance” with high reliability and relatively low costs. A comprehensive review on the remote sensing techniques used for structure and infrastructure monitoring is presented in this paper, focusing the attention especially on satellite remote sensing and UAV photogrammetry techniques. Nowadays, SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) and optical images are widely used for the aforementioned purpose. From one side, the PSIn-SAR (Permanent Scatterer SAR Interferometry) has been exploited to extract information on ground and infrastructure movements; on the other side, optical images allowed to understand the changes occurred in areas of interest by performing a change detection analysis with different algorithms. UAV photogrammetry outputs have been used for more detailed surveys on specific structures or infrastructures, both to metrically model the objects and, consequently, to detect the degradation phenomena. The main results and consideration obtained by the state of art are discussed and compared and the main advantages and limitations are, finally, outlined in order to provide general achievements within this field.