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The European Ground Motion Service provides a plethora of information about land subsidence in the form of Persistent Scatterers (PS). Data for all over Europe will be soon available, facilitating the analysis of ground deformation at a continental level. However, Active Deformation Areas (ADA) may be used instead of PS, since those are more understandable for humans. The CTTC already developed a tool, namely ADAfinder, to produce the said ADAs out of input PS. The authors are involved in an ongoing project, at its very early stages, targeted at computing the Active Deformation Areas for all Europe using the PS data provided by the EGMS, making the results available to the community by means of a WebGIS. A few concepts are already very clear, such as the high volume of information to process, the need of a specific software chain to do the actual processing and the economic cost that storing and making the results accessible might imply. This paper describes how the data volume and economic factors led to the selection of an in-house hosted & developed solution rather than resorting to well-established and expensive providers of cloud-based solutions. Furthermore, the set of self-developed tools required to implement the production chain are also explained. Also, the open-source tool used to prepare a server able to store the data and make it available to the public are described here. Very preliminary but promising figures concerning processing and response times have been included too.

The Geomatics Division of the Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC) has been producing terrain displacement maps for more than 15 years using the PSIG software chain, developed entirely by the members of the aforesaid group. PSIG has reached a high level of maturity, being highly automated but also offering the user the possibility to fine-tune the set of critical parameters controlling the process. However, large areas with a high level of diversity often pose problems in finding a good quality solution using a single set of parameters. Improving the quality of the final terrain displacement map means being able to process very local and critical areas using specific sets of parameters; however, identifying such areas is a difficult process without suitable analysis tools. The VETools, a new software project still under development, but very close to its completion, target this problem. With the VETools it is possible to visualize the results produced by a previous PSIG global processing, analysing their quality, thus making possible to identify the local, critical areas, allowing the user to interactively experiment with specific sets of parameters for these areas, reprocessing them and reviewing the local results as many times as desired and, finally, merging all of them in a single, unique solution whose level of quality is appropriate for the whole area of interest. This work presents the current state of development of the VETools, describing their features and the challenges overcome.

Tracking the members of civil protection or emergency teams is still an open issue. Although outdoors tracking is routinely performed using well-seasoned techniques such as GNSS, this same problem must be still solved for indoors situations. There exist several approaches for indoor positioning, but these are not appropriate for tracking emergency staff in real-time: some of these approaches rely on existing infrastructures; others have not been tested in light devices in real-time; none offers a combined solution. The IOPES project seeks to solve or at least alleviate this problem by building a portable, unobtrusive, lightweight device combining GNSS for outdoor positioning and visual-inertial odometry / SLAM for the indoors case. This work, the third of the IOPES series, presents the analysis of the performance results obtained after developing and testing the first IOPES prototype. To do it, the operational aspects of the prototype, the real-life scenarios where the tests took place and the actual results thus obtained are described.

This paper describes the application of spaceborne and Ground Based radar interferometry as a tool for assisting the management of emergencies related to land movements. The support of the two techniques is carried out integrating some products, using tools available from a software and hardware architecture specifically developed within HEIMDALL, a H2020 project, devoted to providing a multi-hazard Cooperative Management, for Data Exchange, Response Planning and Scenario Building. Deformation maps obtained processing Sentinel-1 SAR images, updated every six days, can provide information over a large area, to be used during the preparedness and recovery phases. Data acquired through a Ground Based SAR system installed in-situ, provide a continuous and discontinuous (periodical) monitoring, aiming at supporting response and recovery phases. The products, in both cases, consist of deformation maps and temporal series, velocity of displacement, obtained through the application of Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI).

The management of emergencies require the use of multiple resources that must be coordinated to achieve the best possible results. For a good decision-making process, the availability of timely and reliable information about the variables on which such process rely is crucial. Among these variables, the ability to track the position in the field - either outdoors or indoors - of the members of the emergency teams it is of special importance. The IOPES project targets at improving an existing, already operational emergency management system where the tracking of operative staff is integrated. This paper concentrates only in the positioning aspect of IOPES - which encompasses other subsystems, such as portable communications or fast mapping - and describes the approach adopted by the project to perform such integration. This includes the concept itself, the hardware selected and well as the algorithms used to implement a portable, lightweight positioning device able to provide seamless indoor / outdoor positioning that will make possible the real-time tracking of personnel in the field. Promising preliminary results for mixed indoor-outdoor trajectories are as well presented.

Transportation corridors such as roadways are often subjected to both natural instability and cut-slope failures, with substantial physical damage to the road infrastructure and threats to the circulating vehicles and passengers. In the early 2000s, the Gipuzkoa Provincial Council of the Basque Country in Spain noted the need for assessing the risk related to the geotechnical hazards of its road network, in order to assess and monitor their safety for road users. The quantitative risk assessment (QRA) was selected as a tool for comparing the risk of different hazards on an objective basis. Few examples of multi-hazard risk assessment along transportation corridors exist. The methodology presented here consists of the calculation of risk, in terms of probability of failure and its respective consequences, and it was applied to 84 selected points of risk (PoR) over the entire road network managed by the Gipuzkoa Provincial Council. The types of encountered slope instabilities that are examined are rockfalls, retaining-wall failures, and slow-moving landslides. The proposed methodology includes the calculation of the probability of failure for each hazard based on an extensive collection of field data, and its association with the expected consequences. Instrumentation data from load cells and inclinometers were used for the anchored walls and the slow-moving landslides, respectively. The expected road damage was assessed for each hazard level in terms of a fixed unit cost (UC). The results indicate that the risk can be comparable for the different hazards. A total of 21 % of the PoR in the study area were found to be of very high risk.

Civil protection and emergency teams work usually under very risky conditions that endanger their lives. One of the factors contributing to such risks is the lack of knowledge about their physical environment, especially when working indoors. Mapping and location indoor and outdoor technologies exist; for outdoors, very good levels of precision and accuracy may be obtained using offthe- shelf equipment; on the other side, and although good solutions for indoor environments are available, these require some extra pre-deployed infrastructure in the area to navigate, which is unacceptable in the case of emergency teams. It may be said, then, that no mature indoor + outdoor integrated solution providing the appropriate precision and accuracy for the purposes of emergency teams exist. In this paper, the assessment of a set of currently available sensors (IMUs, RGB-D cameras, GNSS receivers) and algorithms is presented to show that it is already possible to build such a solution relying on them – providing that appropriate (indoor) lightning and texture conditions exist.

This paper presents the concept of an architecture for a system that helps researchers in the field of Geomatics to speed up their daily research on kinematic geodesy, navigation and positioning fields. The presented ideas correspond to an extensible and modular software system aimed at the development of new navigation and positioning algorithms as well as at the evaluation of the performance of sensors. The concept, already implemented in the CTTC’s system GEMMA is generic and extensible. This means that it is possible to incorporate new navigation algorithms or sensors at no maintenance cost. Only the effort related to the development tasks required to either create such algorithms or model sensors needs to be taken into account. As a consequence, change poses a much smaller problem for CTTC’s research activities is this specific area. This system includes several standalone tools that may be combined in different ways to accomplish various goals; that is, it may be used to perform a variety of tasks, as, for instance, (1) define positioning and navigation scenarios, (2) simulate different kinds of sensors, (3) validate new navigation algorithms or (4) evaluate the quality of an estimated navigation solution.

This work describes the set of tools developed, tested, and put into production in the context of the H2020 project Multi-scale Observation and Monitoring of Railway Infrastructure Threats (MOMIT). This project, which ended in 2019, aimed to show how the use of various remote sensing techniques could help to improve the monitoring of railway infrastructures, such as tracks or bridges, and thus, consequently, improve the detection of ground instabilities and facilitate their management. Several lines of work were opened by MOMIT, but the authors of this work concentrated their efforts in the design of tools to help the detection and identification of ground movements using synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) data. The main output of this activity was a set of tools able to detect the areas labelled active deformation areas (ADA), with the highest deformation rates and to connect them to a geological or anthropogenic process. ADAtools is the name given to the aforementioned set of tools. The description of these tools includes the definition of their targets, inputs, and outputs, as well as details on how the correctness of the applications was checked and on the benchmarks showing their performance. The ADAtools include the following applications: ADAfinder, los2hv, ADAclassifier, and THEXfinder. The toolset is targeted at the analysis and interpretation of InSAR results. Ancillary information supports the semi-automatic interpretation and classification process. Two real use-cases illustrating this statement are included at the end of this paper to show the kind of results that may be obtained with the ADAtools.

In this paper we present a radiometric block adjustment method that is related to geometric block adjustment and to the concept of a terrain Digital Radiometric Model (DRM) as a complement to the terrain digital elevation and surface models. A DRM, in our concept, is a function that for each ground point returns a reflectance value and a Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF). In a similar way to the terrain geometric reconstruction procedure, given an image block of some terrain area, we split the DRM generation in two phases: radiometric block adjustment and DRM generation. In the paper we concentrate on the radiometric block adjustment step, but we also describe a preliminary DRM generator. In the block adjustment step, after a radiometric pre-calibraton step, local atmosphere radiative transfer parameters, and ground reflectances and BRDFs at the radiometric tie points are estimated. This radiometric block adjustment is based on atmospheric radiative transfer (ART) models, pre-selected BRDF models and radiometric ground control points. The proposed concept is implemented and applied in an experimental campaign, and the obtained results are presented. The DRM and orthophoto mosaics are generated showing no radiometric differences at the seam lines.

Orientation and calibration of photogrammetric and remote sensing instruments is a fundamental capacity of current mapping systems and a fundamental research topic. Neither digital remote sensing acquisition systems nor direct orientation gear, like INS and GNSS technologies, made block adjustment obsolete. On the contrary, the continuous flow of new primary data acquisition systems has challenged the capacity of the legacy block adjustment systems – in general network adjustment systems – in many aspects: extensibility, genericity, portability, large data sets capacity, metadata support and many others. In this article, we concentrate on the extensibility and genericity challenges that current and future network systems shall face. For this purpose we propose a number of software design strategies with emphasis on rigorous abstract modeling that help in achieving simplicity, genericity and extensibility together with the protection of intellectual proper rights in a flexible manner. We illustrate our suggestions with the general design approach of GENA, the generic extensible network adjustment system of GeoNumerics.

Objective: to determine the real importance of anamnesis, physical examination, and various tests in the assessment of acute abdominal pain. Methods: a retrospective observational study with patients complaining of abdominal pain at the Emergency Department, Altiplano Health Area (Murcia) was performed. In our study we considered the following variables: socio-demographic data, history of previous surgery, symptoms, place and type of pain. Imaging tests were labeled as positive, negative, or inconclusive for assumed diagnoses, which were retrospectively assessed by an external radiologist who was unaware of the patient's final diagnosis. Results: our study includes 292 patients with a mean age of 45.49 years; 56.8% of these patients were women. Regarding the frequency of the different acute abdomen diagnoses, appendicitis was the main cause (approx. 25%), followed by cholecystitis (10%). We found a significant diagnostic correlation between pain location in the right hypochondrium (RHC) and a diagnosis with cholecystitis. This location was also significant for acute appendicitis (up to 74%). Regarding clinical signs, we only observed a significant correlation between fever and viscera perforation, and between Murphy's sign and cholecystitis. Sensitivity and specificity found in relation to the psoas sign were similar to those seen in other series, 16 and 95% respectively, and slightly lower than the Blumberg or rebound sign, which we found to be around 50 and 23%, respectively. Conclusions: a) anamnesis and physical examination offer limited accuracy when assessing acute abdomen; b) ultrasound scans offer a low diagnostic agreement index for appendicitis; and c) laparoscopy may prove useful for diagnosis, and is also a possible treatment for acute abdominal pain despite its low diagnostic efficiency.Objetivo: determinar la importancia real que en sí tienen la anamnesis, la exploración física y las diferentes pruebas complementarias en la valoración del dolor abdominal agudo. Métodos: estudio observacional y retrospectivo en una población a estudio: Área V de Salud - Altiplano (Murcia). Enfermos que consultan por dolor abdominal en el Servicio de Urgencias. Se realiza una revisión de las historias clínicas. Variables a estudio: datos socio-demográficos, antecedentes personales de cirugía previa, síntomas asociados, localización del dolor y tipo del mismo. Las pruebas complementarias de imagen se etiquetaron como positivas, negativas y no concluyentes para el diagnóstico de presunción y fueron a posteriori reevaluadas por un radiólogo externo que desconocía el diagnóstico final del enfermo. Resultados: el número de pacientes estudiados fue de 292, cuya edad media estuvo en los 45,49 años. El 56,8% fueron mujeres. En cuanto a la frecuencia de los diferentes diagnósticos de abdomen agudo podemos hablar de la apendicitis como principal causa con un porcentaje cercano al 25%, seguido de la colecistitis con un 10%. Encontramos una concordancia diagnóstica significativa entre la localización del dolor en HCD y el diagnóstico de colecistitis. Esta localización también resulta significativa en el caso de la apendicitis aguda, en esta, hasta un 74%. En cuanto a los signos clínicos sólo hemos encontrado una correlación significativa entre la fiebre y la perforación de víscera hueca y entre el signo de Murphy y la colecistitis. La sensibilidad y especificidad encontradas con respecto al signo del psoas son muy similares a las encontradas en otras series entorno al 16 y 95% respectivamente; siendo algo menores con respecto al Blumberg o signo de rebote que se sitúa en nuestro estudio entorno al 50 y 23%. Conclusiones: a) la anamnesis y la exploración física tienen una exactitud limitada a la hora de valorar abdomen agudo; b) la ecografía presenta con respecto a la apendicitis un índice de concordancia diagnóstica bajo; y c) la laparoscopia puede resultar un instrumento útil para el diagnóstico y posible tratamiento del dolor abdominal agudo, aunque la eficiencia diagnóstica que determinaría su utilización sea baja.