Geology of the Saint-Marcel valley metaophiolites (Northwestern Alps, Italy)

The geological map of the Saint-Marcel valley at the scale of 1:20,000 illustrates the tectonic setting of metaophiolites from the southern Aosta Valley, in the Italian side of the Western Alpine belt. The map highlights the sharp contact between the metaophiolitic basement and its metasedimentary cover, which mainly consists of quartzites, marbles, and calcschists. In spite of the Alpine tectonics, this contact is regarded as deriving from the original oceanic crust/sediments interface. Metaophiolites mostly consist of metabasalts hosting Fe\u2013Cu sulphide mineralisations, characterised by high-pressure metamorphic imprint. These rocks likely represent the shallowest portion of the Tethyan oceanic lithosphere created near the axis of the slow-spreading ridge where hydrothermal fluid circulation was active. Selected key-sections through metasediments reveal a consistent internal lithostratigraphy, in spite of the pervasive metamorphic and tectonic reworking acting during the Alpine evolution. Metasediments reflect various sedimentation episodes starting from pelagic and proximal settings to the onset of the orogenic stage. The Saint-Marcel valley metasediments thus reflect a changing in the sedimentation environments through time and space during the overall geologic evolutio

Height Systems and Vertical Datums: a Review in the Australian Context

This paper reviews (without equations) the various definitions of height systems and vertical geodetic datum surfaces, together with their practical realisation for users in Australia. Excluding geopotential numbers, a height system is a one-dimensional coordinate system used to express the metric distance (height) of a point from some reference surface. Its definition varies according to the reference surface chosen and the path along which the height is measured. A vertical geodetic datum is the practical realisation of a height system and its reference surface for users, nominally tied to mean sea level. In Australia, the normal-orthometric height system is used, which is embedded in the Australian Height Datum (AHD). The AHD was realised by the adjustment of ~195,000 km of spirit-levelling observations fixed to limited-term observations of mean sea level at multiple tide-gauges. The paper ends by giving some explanation of the problems with the AHD and of the differences between the AHD and the national geoid model, pointing out that it is preferable to recompute the AHD

Digital image matching in photogrammetry

The paper describes some of the researches developed by the authors since 1989, about a software system designed for photogrammetric positioning and for generation of a Digital Height Model by automatic image matching. The general concepts of the system, the structure of the software and some results are described and discussed

POLYGONAL SHAPES DETECTION IN 3D MODELS OF COMPLEX ARCHITECTURES

A sequential application of two global models defined on a variational framework is proposed for the detection of polygonal shapes in 3D models of complex architectures. As a first step, the procedure involves the use of the Mumford and Shah (1989) 1st-order variational model in dimension two (gridded height data are processed). In the Mumford-Shah model an auxiliary function detects the sharp changes, i.e., the discontinuities, of a piecewise smooth approximation of the data. The Mumford-Shah model requires the global minimization of a specific functional to simultaneously produce both the smooth approximation and its discontinuities. In the proposed procedure, the edges of the smooth approximation derived by a specific processing of the auxiliary function are then processed using the Blake and Zisserman (1987) 2nd-order variational model in dimension one (edges are processed in the plane). This second step permits to describe the edges of an object by means of piecewise almost-linear approximation of the input edges themselves and to detects sharp changes of the first-derivative of the edges so to detect corners. The Mumford-Shah variational model is used in two dimensions accepting the original data as primary input. The Blake-Zisserman variational model is used in one dimension for the refinement of the description of the edges. The selection among all the boundaries detected by the Mumford-Shah model of those that present a shape close to a polygon is performed by considering only those boundaries for which the Blake-Zisserman model identified discontinuities in their first derivative. The output of the procedure are hence shapes, coming from 3D geometric data, that can be considered as polygons. The application of the procedure is suitable for, but not limited to, the detection of objects such as foot-print of polygonal buildings, building facade boundaries or windows contours. v The procedure is applied to a height model of the building of the Engineering Faculty of the University of Trento and to other data. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the variational methods in handling geometric data describing complex objects. The most original and innovative contributions of this work are: - the consecutive and coordinated use of the proper variational models (of first and second order respectively) at first in two dimension and subsequently on the one dimensional sets arising in the first segmentation, - the application to geometrical data that represent a quite complex architecture

Fotogrammetria Digitale

Capitolo n. 17 del Manuale SIFET di Fotogrammetria, Ed. Hopli, Milano (accettato per la pubblicazione), stampato in propri