F. Remondino

Use of unmanned aerial vehicles in monitoring application and management of natural hazards

ABSTRACT The recent development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been increasing the number of technical solutions that can be used to monitor and map the effects of natural hazards. UAVs are generally cheaper and more versatile than traditional remote-sensing techniques, and they can be therefore considered as a good alternative for the acquisition of imagery and other physical parameters before, during and after a natural hazard event. This is an important added value especially for investigations over small areas (few km2). In the special issue ‘The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in monitoring application and management of natural hazards’, we collected a number of case studies, aiming at providing a range of applications of monitoring and management of natural hazards assessed through the use of UAVs.

Web visualization of complex reality-based 3D models with NUBES

This paper discusses the fundamental issues of the real-time web-based visualization of complex reality-based 3D models. As web platform, we use NUBES, an innovative and powerful tool for sharing and analyzing reality-based 3D models online. A new automatic procedure for the setting-up and the uploading of 3D complex scenes into NUBES is presented, including the optimization of the geometric and radiometric information for web visualization.