Monitoring Urban Subsidence in Bucharest City with TerraSAR-X

This work focuses on monitoring the ground motion and infrastructure stability in an urban environment, namely in the city of Bucharest. The city is located in the southeast of Romania and covers an urban area of about 285 km2. Due to its position on the banks of Dambovita River and high underground water levels, the risk of subsidence in the area is significant. Moreover, its closeness to Vrancea seismic area increases the risk of seismic induced deformation in the area. Bucharest is a fast developing city with the average construction rate of 8-20% new buildings with respect to the existing ones. Consequently, the civil engineering industry faced new challenges related to the need of having taller buildings with deeper underground levels, a developing network of subway lines and more bridges with large diameter pilars’ foundations. All these new works have an important impact upon the upper ground stability

Application of Visual Data Mining for Earth Observation Use Cases

This paper presents an application of visual data mining technique to Earth-Observation images for exploring very large image archives. We present a visual data mining workstation solution and create some use cases in order to demonstrate its functionality. This tool allows interactive exploration and analysis of very large, high complexity, and non-visual data sets stored into a database by using human-machine communication. The tool relies on image processing components that transform the image content to primitive feature vectors and a graphical user interface, which allows the exploration of the entire image archive. The use cases are based on Synthetic Aperture Radar images, digital orthophotos and photos in-situ

Visual Data Mining for Exploration of EO Images Archives

The article presents a prototype of a Visual Data Mining (VDM) tool – the so-called DataVis3D tool - aiming at interactively and efficient browsing and understanding of the structure of large data sets of EO imaging products. One of its main applications will be in EO Payload Data Ground Segment (PDGS) of the German satellite mission TerraSAR-X. However, the tool could operate with any type of EO imaging products, such as Sentinel 1 and 2 missions and other similar missions (Spot, Pleiades, Landsat, etc.)

Development of a downstream emergency response service for disaster hazard management based on Earth observation data

The number of hydrological (flood, mass movement), meteorological (tropical storm, extratropical storm, convective storm, local storm), climatological (extreme temperature, drought, wildfire) and geophysical (earthquake, tsunami, volcanic activity) events continue to increases in the last decades at global level. According to different research, statistics and databases (UNISDR, EM-DAT) floods are the most frequent in the last decades worldwide and especially in Romania. On the other hand, the probabilistic hazard results for Romania indicate that, in the future, the highest damages will be produced by floods and earthquakes. In this context, it has become necessary to develop an emergency response service. The emergency service, named GEODIM, integrates the GIS geodatabases: roads, rivers, administrative units, land cover/land use, satellite data (optical and synthetic aperture radar), in-situ measurements, in order to support the disaster management. The Earth Observations data offers the capabilities to monitor the disasters at a large scale, being able to identify areas where the events are not in-situ observed or to monitor large vulnerable areas potentially affected by disasters. The paper presents the downstream emergency response service for disaster hazard in Romania, based on Earth Observation data and other geo-information information