Diego Polli - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Diego Polli

Research paper thumbnail of Vulnerability Data Collection and Definition of Seismic Risk for Cities in Palestine

Abstract. This paper investigates the web with GIS functionality (WebGIS) realized by Eucentre (E... more Abstract. This paper investigates the web with GIS functionality (WebGIS) realized by Eucentre (EUropean CENtre for Training and Research in Earthquake engineering) for SASPARM 2.0 (Support Action for Strengthening PAlestine capabilities for seismic Risk Mitigation) project [1]. The end users of the WebGIS are citizens, students, practitioners, governmental and non-governmental institutions. The platform represents a very useful and intuitive tool to load and manage data collected during the survey of residential buildings. Both practitioners and citizens can collect structural data for residential buildings by using two forms, different from each other only in terms of detail. The forms are organized into sections and they allow to identify the main geometrical and structural features of the surveyed buildings. The forms can be compiled directly on WebGIS or through two apps specifically created for Android operating system 4.0 and following. The apps enable the compilation of the ...

Research paper thumbnail of Studio di vulnerabilità di una vasta area industriale mediante immagini telerilevate da satellite

Con il presente articolo s’intende portare a conoscenza del mondo dei professionisti che si occup... more Con il presente articolo s’intende portare a conoscenza del mondo dei professionisti che si occupano d’ingegneria sismica un aspetto ancora poco noto, pur essendo potenzialmente molto utile. In questo lavoro si dimostrera che l’utilizzo d’immagini telerilevate da satellite puo rappresentare una fonte d’informazione preziosa nei casi in cui i dati non sono disponibili in forma omogenea ed un sopralluogo non e in grado di assicurare una fornitura tempestiva dei dati necessari. S’illustrera inoltre il vantaggio in termini di tempo e manodopera comunque ottenibile con le tecniche mostrate anche nei casi in cui la disponibilita delle informazioni fosse assicurata per le vie tradizionali. Nel caso qui trattato e stato intrapreso lo studio di vulnerabilita di una vasta area industriale sita nel golfo di Siracusa. Una serie di fattori hanno reso particolarmente difficile il reperimento delle informazioni costruttive sulle strutture ed infrastrutture presenti nel sito (serbatoi, condotte, ci...

Research paper thumbnail of Assessing Earthquake Damage from Post-Event VHR Radar Images Only: A Preliminary Study on Cosmo/Skymed Images from the L’Aquila, 6TH April 2009 Earthquake

Research paper thumbnail of Primi passi verso la valutazione della vulnerabilità sismica tramite strumenti di telerilevamento

Il rischio sismico dipende sia dalla pericolosita sia dalla vulnerabilita degli elementi esposti.... more Il rischio sismico dipende sia dalla pericolosita sia dalla vulnerabilita degli elementi esposti. E evidente che quest’ultimo parametro presenta un interesse almeno pari a quello della pericolosita sismica, sia per le autorita che devono gestire e mitigare il rischio sismico, sia per gli operatori del settore privato, come le imprese di assicurazione, che a vario titolo necessitano di queste informazioni. Oggi la stima della vulnerabilita degli edifici e svolta con metodi molto accurati ma anche esigenti in termini di dati che e necessario fornire al modello; questa caratteristica limita necessariamente l’indagine a un campione ridotto di edifici, oppure costringe a ricorrere a metodi statistici anziche deterministici. Con il presente articolo si vogliono illustrare i primi passi svolti nella direzione della costruzione di un sistema per la valutazione approssimativa della vulnerabilita sismica affidandosi in linea di principio solo a dati telerilevati da satellite o da aereo. L’obi...

Research paper thumbnail of Further advances in automatic mapping of seismic damage based on very high resolution SAR images

Research paper thumbnail of 2.1 Il telerilevamento satellitare come strumento per la gestione delle emergenze da disastri naturali: caso di studio sul terremoto de L’Aquila del 6 aprile 2009

Research paper thumbnail of Italian Platform for Seismic Risk and Damage Scenario Evaluation

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computational Methods in Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering (COMPDYN 2015)

Eucentre has developed a platform addressed to the scientific community in which different resear... more Eucentre has developed a platform addressed to the scientific community in which different research groups can share data, methods and models to evaluate the seismic risk of Italian territory. In the platform, called IRMA (Italian Risk MAps), there are different tabs and tools that allow producing seismic risk maps and damage scenarios with OpenQuake. OpenQuake is a calculation engine that has been recently developed as part of the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) (http://www.globalquakemodel.org) to evaluate the earthquake loss estimation. To perform earthquake damage scenario or risk calculations, in the platform IRMA the user can either create or upload different exposure/vulnerability databases as well as different sets of fragility curves. The hazard is fixed and it is the MPS04 hazard model, developed by INGV

Research paper thumbnail of IRMA platform for the calculation of damages and risks of Italian residential buildings

Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering

Research paper thumbnail of Central Italy sequence: simulated damage scenario for the main 2016 shocks

Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering

Research paper thumbnail of Calibration of a mechanics-based method for large-scale vulnerability assessment

Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering

Research paper thumbnail of Spaceborne support to post-earthquake operations: detection of sparse man-made features in wide-scale safety inspection

In the immediate aftermath of a major earthquake, in-situ inspection of structures to determine t... more In the immediate aftermath of a major earthquake, in-situ inspection of structures to determine their damage level is vital to prepare a damage scenario and to determine the risk connected to aftershocks. While inspecting urban areas is mainly an organisational matter, in rural areas, the presence and location of sparse man-made structures may not be readily available information. In this context, the use of VHR SAR data may reveal very useful to detect and locate features relevant to the damage inspection. Several techniques have been developed to locate urban areas and urban patches, but their focus was mainly on accurately tracking urban boundaries rather than finding smallest, sparse clusters of buildings. In this paper, the authors build on their experience with the 6 th April 2009, Italy earthquake to develop a detection technique focussing on this particular application. The method and the results of preliminary testing on pre-and post-event COSMO/SkyMed images are presented and discussed. The full paper will present more extensive testing and deeper insight into some of the issues touched on in this extended abstract paper.

Research paper thumbnail of Crowdsourcing as a seismic damage assessment tool: a case study on 2011 Christchurch earthquakes

Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually a... more Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call. This concept is especially appealing to be used in emergency situations in order to obtain fast and widely-distributed information over the entire affected region, which allows at the end performing suitable risk management actions. Given an emergency event (fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.), ordinary or trained habitants can collaborate gathering the necessary data that after some processing will reach the hands of decisions makers and help them coordinate the mitigation actions. The sense of contribution or collaboration encourages the people to work more and better, ending up in a relatively fast and low-cost process. One of the best examples is the production of intensity maps after an earthquake (e.g. USGS) with information gathered from internet forms; filled out by affected habitants according to what they had seen or felt at their location at the moment of the event. In this manuscript, the focus is on assessing the usefulness of the data generated from crowdsourcing for earthquake damage assessment on buildings. A small set of photographs was purposely taken in a selected area of Christchurch, New Zealand by two persons a few days after the earthquake. This dataset is used to study the technique with an engineering and geophysicist point of view, and the pros and cons of it are analyzed and briefly discussed, having also in mind a possible comparison of ground assessments with possible satellite data on the same area.

Research paper thumbnail of Mapping Earthquake Damage from Post-Event only VHR SAR Texture Maps: Zooming into Poor Estimation Cases

Abstract. The use of EO data in earthquake contexts, especially for damage assessment purposes, h... more Abstract. The use of EO data in earthquake contexts, especially for damage assessment purposes, has been widely proposed and a number of results have been presented after every event, mostly based on optical data and some degree of manual interpretation. Our research group tries and focus on radar data and on automatization of the damage assessment procedure by investigating the possibility to use only post-event, Very High Resolution (VHR) radar data to estimate the damage level aggregated at the size of the ...

Research paper thumbnail of Urban seismic damage assessment from post-event only SAR: preliminary tests on Envisat ASAR data

Some of the authors have recently proposed a new possible starting point for seismic damage asses... more Some of the authors have recently proposed a new possible starting point for seismic damage assessment from spaceborne SAR data. It relies on correlation between damage level at an urban block level and some selected texture measures computed on post-event, Very-High-Resolution (VHR) spaceborne SAR reflectivity maps. Some experiments have then been conducted on ERS and ERS-like data offered by the European Space Agency and reprocessed to optimize spatial resolution, in order to test whether also ...

Research paper thumbnail of Automatic mapping of earthquake damage using post-event radar satellite data: The story goes on

Proc. 30th EARSeL Symp, 2010

Abstract. Destructive earthquakes challenge Earth Observation (EO) systems to demonstrate their u... more Abstract. Destructive earthquakes challenge Earth Observation (EO) systems to demonstrate their usefulness in supporting intervention and relief actions. The use of EO data in earthquake contexts, especially for damage assessment purposes, has been widely proposed and a number of results have been presented after every event, mostly based on optical data and manual interpretation. In this paper, the latest in a series, we instead try and focus on radar data and on automatization of the damage assessment procedure. Using ...

Research paper thumbnail of Urban block outlining in High-Resolution SAR images based on detection of linear features

Proc. 2011 EARSeL Symposium, 2011

Abstract. While analyzing remotely sensed images of urban areas, in many cases an at least approx... more Abstract. While analyzing remotely sensed images of urban areas, in many cases an at least approximate knowledge of its block boundaries is useful for specializing operations over areas, within which a certain degree of homogeneity can be assumed. In the case of use for emergency management, though, this information may not be accessible in a reasonable time or with a reasonable effort, while it would be useful as a basis for eg earthquake damage assessment at the block level [1].

Research paper thumbnail of Radar remote sensing for damage assessment: case study on L'Aquila, Italy, 6th April 2009 earthquake

2009 International Symposium on Geoinformation for Disaster Management (Gi4DM), Turin, Italy, Feb 1, 2010

ABSTRACT: Destructive earthquakes, as much as other natural disasters, represent a challenge for ... more ABSTRACT: Destructive earthquakes, as much as other natural disasters, represent a challenge for Earth Observation (EO) systems to demonstrate their usefulness in supporting intervention and relief actions. The use of EO data in a disaster context has been widely investigated by many actors, but only recently the developed methods seem to have reached near to the operational use. In this paper a case study on the 6th April 2009 earthquake event, which stroke L'Aquila, Italy, is considered. In particular, the use of new- ...

Research paper thumbnail of Spaceborne support to post-earthquake operations: detection of sparse man-made features in wide-scale safety inspection

Synthetic Aperture Radar ( …, Jun 7, 2010

In the immediate aftermath of a major earthquake, in-situ inspection of structures to determine t... more In the immediate aftermath of a major earthquake, in-situ inspection of structures to determine their damage level is vital to prepare a damage scenario and to determine the risk connected to aftershocks. While inspecting urban areas is mainly an organisational matter, in rural areas, the presence and location of sparse man-made structures may not be readily available information. In this context, the use of VHR SAR data may reveal very useful to detect and locate features relevant to the damage inspection. Several techniques have ...

Research paper thumbnail of SAR-Based Seismic Damage Assessment in Urban Areas: Scaling Down Resolution, Scaling Up Computational Performance

Research paper thumbnail of Mapping earthquake damage in VHR radar images of human settlements: Preliminary results on the 6th April 2009, Italy case

Geoscience and Remote …, Jan 1, 2010

Automated earthquake damage assessment from post-event only remotely sensed data is highly desira... more Automated earthquake damage assessment from post-event only remotely sensed data is highly desirable, especially when new generation, Very High Resolution (VHR) spaceborne data is concerned, lacking extensive pre-event archives. Though, most damage assessment method either rely on human interpretation or on pre-post-event comparison. In this paper we illustrate some possible tracks for investigating damage assessment on post-event only data, focusing on the 6 th April 2009 Abruzzi, Italy earthquake and on related COSMO/SkyMed acquisitions.

Research paper thumbnail of Vulnerability Data Collection and Definition of Seismic Risk for Cities in Palestine

Abstract. This paper investigates the web with GIS functionality (WebGIS) realized by Eucentre (E... more Abstract. This paper investigates the web with GIS functionality (WebGIS) realized by Eucentre (EUropean CENtre for Training and Research in Earthquake engineering) for SASPARM 2.0 (Support Action for Strengthening PAlestine capabilities for seismic Risk Mitigation) project [1]. The end users of the WebGIS are citizens, students, practitioners, governmental and non-governmental institutions. The platform represents a very useful and intuitive tool to load and manage data collected during the survey of residential buildings. Both practitioners and citizens can collect structural data for residential buildings by using two forms, different from each other only in terms of detail. The forms are organized into sections and they allow to identify the main geometrical and structural features of the surveyed buildings. The forms can be compiled directly on WebGIS or through two apps specifically created for Android operating system 4.0 and following. The apps enable the compilation of the ...

Research paper thumbnail of Studio di vulnerabilità di una vasta area industriale mediante immagini telerilevate da satellite

Con il presente articolo s’intende portare a conoscenza del mondo dei professionisti che si occup... more Con il presente articolo s’intende portare a conoscenza del mondo dei professionisti che si occupano d’ingegneria sismica un aspetto ancora poco noto, pur essendo potenzialmente molto utile. In questo lavoro si dimostrera che l’utilizzo d’immagini telerilevate da satellite puo rappresentare una fonte d’informazione preziosa nei casi in cui i dati non sono disponibili in forma omogenea ed un sopralluogo non e in grado di assicurare una fornitura tempestiva dei dati necessari. S’illustrera inoltre il vantaggio in termini di tempo e manodopera comunque ottenibile con le tecniche mostrate anche nei casi in cui la disponibilita delle informazioni fosse assicurata per le vie tradizionali. Nel caso qui trattato e stato intrapreso lo studio di vulnerabilita di una vasta area industriale sita nel golfo di Siracusa. Una serie di fattori hanno reso particolarmente difficile il reperimento delle informazioni costruttive sulle strutture ed infrastrutture presenti nel sito (serbatoi, condotte, ci...

Research paper thumbnail of Assessing Earthquake Damage from Post-Event VHR Radar Images Only: A Preliminary Study on Cosmo/Skymed Images from the L’Aquila, 6TH April 2009 Earthquake

Research paper thumbnail of Primi passi verso la valutazione della vulnerabilità sismica tramite strumenti di telerilevamento

Il rischio sismico dipende sia dalla pericolosita sia dalla vulnerabilita degli elementi esposti.... more Il rischio sismico dipende sia dalla pericolosita sia dalla vulnerabilita degli elementi esposti. E evidente che quest’ultimo parametro presenta un interesse almeno pari a quello della pericolosita sismica, sia per le autorita che devono gestire e mitigare il rischio sismico, sia per gli operatori del settore privato, come le imprese di assicurazione, che a vario titolo necessitano di queste informazioni. Oggi la stima della vulnerabilita degli edifici e svolta con metodi molto accurati ma anche esigenti in termini di dati che e necessario fornire al modello; questa caratteristica limita necessariamente l’indagine a un campione ridotto di edifici, oppure costringe a ricorrere a metodi statistici anziche deterministici. Con il presente articolo si vogliono illustrare i primi passi svolti nella direzione della costruzione di un sistema per la valutazione approssimativa della vulnerabilita sismica affidandosi in linea di principio solo a dati telerilevati da satellite o da aereo. L’obi...

Research paper thumbnail of Further advances in automatic mapping of seismic damage based on very high resolution SAR images

Research paper thumbnail of 2.1 Il telerilevamento satellitare come strumento per la gestione delle emergenze da disastri naturali: caso di studio sul terremoto de L’Aquila del 6 aprile 2009

Research paper thumbnail of Italian Platform for Seismic Risk and Damage Scenario Evaluation

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computational Methods in Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering (COMPDYN 2015)

Eucentre has developed a platform addressed to the scientific community in which different resear... more Eucentre has developed a platform addressed to the scientific community in which different research groups can share data, methods and models to evaluate the seismic risk of Italian territory. In the platform, called IRMA (Italian Risk MAps), there are different tabs and tools that allow producing seismic risk maps and damage scenarios with OpenQuake. OpenQuake is a calculation engine that has been recently developed as part of the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) (http://www.globalquakemodel.org) to evaluate the earthquake loss estimation. To perform earthquake damage scenario or risk calculations, in the platform IRMA the user can either create or upload different exposure/vulnerability databases as well as different sets of fragility curves. The hazard is fixed and it is the MPS04 hazard model, developed by INGV

Research paper thumbnail of IRMA platform for the calculation of damages and risks of Italian residential buildings

Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering

Research paper thumbnail of Central Italy sequence: simulated damage scenario for the main 2016 shocks

Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering

Research paper thumbnail of Calibration of a mechanics-based method for large-scale vulnerability assessment

Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering

Research paper thumbnail of Spaceborne support to post-earthquake operations: detection of sparse man-made features in wide-scale safety inspection

In the immediate aftermath of a major earthquake, in-situ inspection of structures to determine t... more In the immediate aftermath of a major earthquake, in-situ inspection of structures to determine their damage level is vital to prepare a damage scenario and to determine the risk connected to aftershocks. While inspecting urban areas is mainly an organisational matter, in rural areas, the presence and location of sparse man-made structures may not be readily available information. In this context, the use of VHR SAR data may reveal very useful to detect and locate features relevant to the damage inspection. Several techniques have been developed to locate urban areas and urban patches, but their focus was mainly on accurately tracking urban boundaries rather than finding smallest, sparse clusters of buildings. In this paper, the authors build on their experience with the 6 th April 2009, Italy earthquake to develop a detection technique focussing on this particular application. The method and the results of preliminary testing on pre-and post-event COSMO/SkyMed images are presented and discussed. The full paper will present more extensive testing and deeper insight into some of the issues touched on in this extended abstract paper.

Research paper thumbnail of Crowdsourcing as a seismic damage assessment tool: a case study on 2011 Christchurch earthquakes

Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually a... more Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call. This concept is especially appealing to be used in emergency situations in order to obtain fast and widely-distributed information over the entire affected region, which allows at the end performing suitable risk management actions. Given an emergency event (fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.), ordinary or trained habitants can collaborate gathering the necessary data that after some processing will reach the hands of decisions makers and help them coordinate the mitigation actions. The sense of contribution or collaboration encourages the people to work more and better, ending up in a relatively fast and low-cost process. One of the best examples is the production of intensity maps after an earthquake (e.g. USGS) with information gathered from internet forms; filled out by affected habitants according to what they had seen or felt at their location at the moment of the event. In this manuscript, the focus is on assessing the usefulness of the data generated from crowdsourcing for earthquake damage assessment on buildings. A small set of photographs was purposely taken in a selected area of Christchurch, New Zealand by two persons a few days after the earthquake. This dataset is used to study the technique with an engineering and geophysicist point of view, and the pros and cons of it are analyzed and briefly discussed, having also in mind a possible comparison of ground assessments with possible satellite data on the same area.

Research paper thumbnail of Mapping Earthquake Damage from Post-Event only VHR SAR Texture Maps: Zooming into Poor Estimation Cases

Abstract. The use of EO data in earthquake contexts, especially for damage assessment purposes, h... more Abstract. The use of EO data in earthquake contexts, especially for damage assessment purposes, has been widely proposed and a number of results have been presented after every event, mostly based on optical data and some degree of manual interpretation. Our research group tries and focus on radar data and on automatization of the damage assessment procedure by investigating the possibility to use only post-event, Very High Resolution (VHR) radar data to estimate the damage level aggregated at the size of the ...

Research paper thumbnail of Urban seismic damage assessment from post-event only SAR: preliminary tests on Envisat ASAR data

Some of the authors have recently proposed a new possible starting point for seismic damage asses... more Some of the authors have recently proposed a new possible starting point for seismic damage assessment from spaceborne SAR data. It relies on correlation between damage level at an urban block level and some selected texture measures computed on post-event, Very-High-Resolution (VHR) spaceborne SAR reflectivity maps. Some experiments have then been conducted on ERS and ERS-like data offered by the European Space Agency and reprocessed to optimize spatial resolution, in order to test whether also ...

Research paper thumbnail of Automatic mapping of earthquake damage using post-event radar satellite data: The story goes on

Proc. 30th EARSeL Symp, 2010

Abstract. Destructive earthquakes challenge Earth Observation (EO) systems to demonstrate their u... more Abstract. Destructive earthquakes challenge Earth Observation (EO) systems to demonstrate their usefulness in supporting intervention and relief actions. The use of EO data in earthquake contexts, especially for damage assessment purposes, has been widely proposed and a number of results have been presented after every event, mostly based on optical data and manual interpretation. In this paper, the latest in a series, we instead try and focus on radar data and on automatization of the damage assessment procedure. Using ...

Research paper thumbnail of Urban block outlining in High-Resolution SAR images based on detection of linear features

Proc. 2011 EARSeL Symposium, 2011

Abstract. While analyzing remotely sensed images of urban areas, in many cases an at least approx... more Abstract. While analyzing remotely sensed images of urban areas, in many cases an at least approximate knowledge of its block boundaries is useful for specializing operations over areas, within which a certain degree of homogeneity can be assumed. In the case of use for emergency management, though, this information may not be accessible in a reasonable time or with a reasonable effort, while it would be useful as a basis for eg earthquake damage assessment at the block level [1].

Research paper thumbnail of Radar remote sensing for damage assessment: case study on L'Aquila, Italy, 6th April 2009 earthquake

2009 International Symposium on Geoinformation for Disaster Management (Gi4DM), Turin, Italy, Feb 1, 2010

ABSTRACT: Destructive earthquakes, as much as other natural disasters, represent a challenge for ... more ABSTRACT: Destructive earthquakes, as much as other natural disasters, represent a challenge for Earth Observation (EO) systems to demonstrate their usefulness in supporting intervention and relief actions. The use of EO data in a disaster context has been widely investigated by many actors, but only recently the developed methods seem to have reached near to the operational use. In this paper a case study on the 6th April 2009 earthquake event, which stroke L'Aquila, Italy, is considered. In particular, the use of new- ...

Research paper thumbnail of Spaceborne support to post-earthquake operations: detection of sparse man-made features in wide-scale safety inspection

Synthetic Aperture Radar ( …, Jun 7, 2010

In the immediate aftermath of a major earthquake, in-situ inspection of structures to determine t... more In the immediate aftermath of a major earthquake, in-situ inspection of structures to determine their damage level is vital to prepare a damage scenario and to determine the risk connected to aftershocks. While inspecting urban areas is mainly an organisational matter, in rural areas, the presence and location of sparse man-made structures may not be readily available information. In this context, the use of VHR SAR data may reveal very useful to detect and locate features relevant to the damage inspection. Several techniques have ...

Research paper thumbnail of SAR-Based Seismic Damage Assessment in Urban Areas: Scaling Down Resolution, Scaling Up Computational Performance

Research paper thumbnail of Mapping earthquake damage in VHR radar images of human settlements: Preliminary results on the 6th April 2009, Italy case

Geoscience and Remote …, Jan 1, 2010

Automated earthquake damage assessment from post-event only remotely sensed data is highly desira... more Automated earthquake damage assessment from post-event only remotely sensed data is highly desirable, especially when new generation, Very High Resolution (VHR) spaceborne data is concerned, lacking extensive pre-event archives. Though, most damage assessment method either rely on human interpretation or on pre-post-event comparison. In this paper we illustrate some possible tracks for investigating damage assessment on post-event only data, focusing on the 6 th April 2009 Abruzzi, Italy earthquake and on related COSMO/SkyMed acquisitions.