Survey, diagnosis and monitoring of structures and land using geomatics techniques: theoretical and experimental aspects

The Geomatics techniques for the detection and representation of the land and objects have seen an exceptional development in recent years. The applications are innumerable and range from land planning to geophysics, from mitigation of landslide risk to monitoring of artifacts, from cultural heritage to medicine. With particular regard to the structures and to the land, the technologies used can be divided into three categories: techniques based on the acquisition and processing of images, techniques based on the measurement of angles and distances, and combinations of the foregoing. After an overview of Geomatics techniques and their basic theoretical concepts, a number of aspects have been thoroughly investigated. There follows a series of applications of the techniques described. Finally two new applications for deflection measurement of bridges under dynamic load are presented.