Towards an end-to-end airborne remote-sensing system for post-hazard assessment of damage to hyper-critical infrastructure: research progress and needs

ABSTRACT

The objective of this article is to synthesize research findings and requirements pertaining to development of time-sensitive remote-sensing systems (TSRSS) that support decision-making pertaining to post-hazard assessment of damage to what we define as hyper-critical infrastructure (HCI), based on an aerial imaging approach known as repeat station imaging (RSI). The following TSRSS components are addressed and related findings are reported: (1) understanding information requirements of emergency managers pertaining to damage of HCI; (2) flight planning and data capture requirements for supporting bi-temporal RSI pairs; (3) automatic image registration and shadow classification and normalization routines applied to RSI pairs; (4) damage detection and delineation approach that exploits simple temporal differences in image brightness to automatically, reliably, and robustly delineates new cracks associated with damage; and (5) rapid data and information transfer to emergency managers. The highest priority follow-on research topics are: (1) integrating small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) with the RSI approach, while enabling multiple view perspectives other than vertical (i.e. nadir pointing) and (2) developing and testing of machine learning routines for automatic identification of damage features from RSI pairs, particularly those captured from integrated sUAS–RSI.

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the National Science Foundation Directorate of Engineering, Infrastructure Management and Extreme Events (IMEE) program (Grant Number G00010529) and United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research & Technology (OST-R) Commercial Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Technologies Program (CRS&SI), cooperative agreement # OASRTRS-14-H-UNM. Christopher Chen, Andrew Kerr, Garrick MacDonald, Eugene Schweizer, Emanuel Storey, and Nicholas Zamora (SDSU), and Jesse Sprague, Tammira Taylor, and Su Zhang (UNM), Hubiao Lan and A. Stewart Walker (BAE Systems), and Richard McCreight (NEOS, LTD) contributed to research components associated with this article. Valuable guidance was provided by Bruce Davis (formerly with US Department of Homeland Security), John Desmarais with the US Civil Air Patrol, and Stephen Rea with the County of San Diego Office of Emergency Services.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation [G00010529] and U.S. Department of Transportation [OASRTRS-14-H-UNM].