The Benínar Dam, located in Southeastern Spain, is an earth-fill dam that has experienced filtration issues since its construction in 1985. Despite the installation of various monitoring systems, the data collected are sparse and inadequate for the dam’s lifetime. The present research integrates Multi-Temporal Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (MT-InSAR) and dam modeling to validate the monitoring of this dam, opening the way to enhanced integrated monitoring systems. MT-InSAR was proved to be a reliable and continuous monitoring system for dam deformation, surpassing previously installed systems in terms of precision. MT-InSAR allowed the almost-continuous monitoring of this dam since 1992, combining ERS, Envisat, and Sentinel-1A/B data. Line-of-sight (LOS) velocities of settlement in the crest of the dam evolved from maximums of −6 mm/year (1992–2000), −4 mm/year (2002–2010), and −2 mm/year (2015–2021) with median values of −2.6 and −3.0 mm/year in the first periods (ERS and Envisat) and −1.3 mm/year in the Sentinel 1-A/B period. These results are consistent with the maximum admissible modeled deformation from construction, confirming that settlement was more intense in the dam’s early stages and decreased over time. MT-InSAR was also used to integrate the monitoring of the dam basin, including critical slopes, quarries, and infrastructures, such as roads, tracks, and spillways. This study allows us to conclude that MT-InSAR and dam modeling are important elements for the integrated monitoring systems of embankment dams. This conclusion supports the complete integration of MT-InSAR and 3D modeling into the monitoring systems of embankment dams, as they are a key complement to traditional geotechnical monitoring and can overcome the main limitations of topographical monitoring.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is delivering major advances in the construction engineering sector in this era of building information modelling, applying data collection techniques based on urban image analysis. In this study, building heights were calculated from street-view imagery based on a semantic segmentation machine learning model. The model has a fully convolutional architecture and is based on the HRNet encoder and ResNexts depth separable convolutions, achieving fast runtime and state-of-the-art results on standard semantic segmentation tasks. Average building heights on a pilot German street were satisfactorily estimated with a maximum error of 3 m. Further research alternatives are discussed, as well as the difficulties of obtaining valuable training data to apply these models in countries with no training datasets and different urban conditions. This line of research contributes to the characterisation of buildings and the estimation of attributes essential for the assessment of seismic risk using automatically processed street-view imagery.
1 February 2019 in International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation