LANDSLIDE SURVEYS USING LOW-COST UAV AND FOSS PHOTOGRAMMETRIC WORKFLOW

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle have found their usage in various academic and industry domains, mainly due to the versatility of options that one aircraft can offer from onboard sensors for data acquisition and positioning, through different weight and size categories allowing different applications, including landslide mapping and surveying. Survey-grade UAVs can provide very precise flight and data but usually are very costly, and their use can be further bounded by many regulations. In this work, we have adopted a low-cost consumer-grade UAV to do multitemporal monitoring of an active landslide (Ruinon) in Northern Italy to evaluate the applicability of such setup in the landslide hazard domain. Moreover, for flight planning, photogrammetric reconstruction, and comparative analyses we have adopted free and open-source software solutions. The resulted dense point clouds and orthophotos yielded very satisfactory results from accuracies of few meters and even sub-meter level when reconstructed with field-surveyed ground control points. As a result, from the two surveys comparisons, July and October 2021, several displaced boulders and debris were detected where no significant reactivations were detected from our surveys. Such low-cost setup can be used also from non-professionals and in citizen science campaigns which can significantly contribute to additional landslide mapping and analyses by providing valuable datasets.