Advanced processing of remotely sensed big data for cultural heritage conservation

Abstract

Damage assessment, protection and preservation of built patrimony are a priority at national and local levels due to their importance to many cultural and economic aspects. This paper presents a methodology to estimate the potential damage caused by ground settlement for cultural heritage buildings using remotely sensed big data. Specifically, it presents a framework to assess the potential damage caused by ground settlement for masonry, infilled and bare frames structures using Persistent Scatterer Interferometric (PSI) measurements. The proposed solution advances the state-of-the-art by integrating big Earth observation (EO), environmental, architectural and historical data, for estimating the settlement induced damage to hundreds thousands of buildings. The fully automatic scheme was created within cloud computing environment for accelerating data transfer, processing and modeling and for improving the visualization of image-derived products.