Deformation Monitoring by High Resolution Terrestrial Long Range Sensing (DE-MONTES)

Framework: FP7 — Capacities
Programme: Research for the benefit of SMEs
Destination: Research for SMEs
Action type: Research for the benefit of specific groups
Countries involved: Austria,Czechia,Germany,Cyprus,Norway,Austria
Call:  (FP7-SME-2011, 2011)
Start date: 2012-01-01
End date: 2014-04-30
Duration (months): 28.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1513261.4
EU funding (EUR): 1015600.0
Participants: 7
Project status: CLOSED

The necessity for monitoring geo-risk areas such as rock slides is growing due to the increasing probability of such events caused by environmental change. Europe is one leader in survey technology, due to well-established providers of measurement systems and frameworks. In Europe, rock slides cause increasing damage particularly in alpine areas. DE-MONTES provides an efficient, highly automated, high-resolution, terrestrial, long range sensing measurement and analysis system which is able to monitor geo-risk (and related) objects by means of non-signalized natural target points - which is a key to such systems due to the lack of reachability and the required distance-to-the-object. Even novel sensor concepts such as terrestrial laser scanning can only cover a subset of the requirements, they limit the distance of application to 1-2 km and do not provide the ability to track individual surface points in high resolution - an important feature to detect regions of motion early enough for taking measures of protection, warning inhabitants, closing infrastructure or evacuation. It is mostly SMEs that run services in this area, reacting with a case-by-case strategy, using conventional technology. There is no well- established market yet on this family of applications, although the occurrence of dozens of events per year indicate that a mature observation system such as DE-MONTES is overdue. DE-MONTES is the first such system to cover long range applications and it would settle a new standard of reacting to this growing field of environmental misconduct. With the help of its research Partners, the DE-MONTES Project will build and test a productive prototype system for short-term exploitation of the SMEs involved in the Project, such that after project termination they immediately can use the system in their service portfolio, gain new business fields by exporting the system to related application areas, and can also use components of the system in related in-house R&D such as construction, archeological site survey, industrial inspection, or geo-monitoring. The project combines methods and techniques from standard surveying, computer vision, photogrammetry, mechatronics, software engineering, and geological sciences, well covered by the academic and research partners. The main step beyond currently available techniques lies in the introduction of a novel modular suite of terrestrial visual survey sensors, namely Image Assisted Total Stations (IATS, used to perform long-range high-resolution measurements on single points) and Terrestrial long-range laser scanners (TLS, used to survey large areas). The envisaged system, developed by the R&D partners, incorporates the sensors, their control & data processing, and a framework that enables an expert user (geodesist / geologist) to operate the software. Applications, test environments and verification procedures are provided by the SME partners.

Keywords: image assisted total stations,deformation monitoring,terrestrial laser scanning,digital photogrammetry