This study introduces new methods and applications for detecting, evaluating, and tracking signs of environmental contamination using a variety of advanced aerial platforms, a suite of advanced sensors, and new detection software. Aerial platform examples include: manned aircraft and helicopters, unmanned fixed wing aircraft (UAV), and unmanned rotorcraft. The onboard sensors include an array of multispectral and electro-optical infrared cameras. The developed system, which is being used by the Italian Coast Guard, is ideal for detecting illegal and unauthorized sewer and storm-drain environmental policy violations. The methods presented here were developed to detect pollution in rivers and the sea. The results of these current studies show that: (1) infrared thermography is an ideal tool to detect environmental contamination, (2) a variety of aerial platforms ranging from manned aircraft to small unmanned rotorcraft should be used to first globally scan the region and then locally focus on the suspected site, and (3) the measured high resolution database accurately defines the current state of the region which provides a benchmark for future investigations.

The use of remote-sensing images is becoming common practice in the fight against environmental crimes. However, the challenge of exploiting the complementary information provided by radar and optical data, and by more conventional sources encoded in geographic information systems, is still open. In this work, we propose a new workflow for the detection of potentially hazardous cattle-breeding facilities, exploiting both synthetic aperture radar and optical multitemporal data together with geospatial analyses in the geographic information system environment. The data fusion is performed at a feature-based level. Experiments on data available for the area of Caserta, in southern Italy, show that the proposed technique provides very high detection capability, up to 95%, with a very low false alarm rate. A fast and easy-to-use system has been realized based on this approach, which is a useful tool in the hand of agencies engaged in the protection of territory

Being able to identify the environmental crimes and the guilty parties is central to police investigations, and new technologies enable the authorities to do this faster and more accurately than ever before. In recent years, our research team has introduced the use of a range of aerial platforms and an innovative application of thermography to detect several illegal activities; for example, illegal sanitary sewer and storm-drain connections, illicit wastewater discharges, and other "anomalies" on surface waters can be easily identified using their thermal infrared signatures. It can also be used to detect illegal solid/liquid waste dumps or illicit air discharges. This paper introduces first results of a Thermal Pattern and Thermal Tracking approach that can be used to identify different phenomena and several pollutants. The aims of this paper were to introduce a fingerprint paradigm for environmental police investigations, defining several specific signatures (patterns) that permit the identification of an illicit/anomalous activity, and establish a procedure to use this information to find the correlation (tracking) between the crime and the culprit or the source and the target.

IDES-Intelligent Data Extraction System-is the name of a new project, founded by Campania Regional Government (Italy) and developed by the CIRA-Italian Aerospace Research Centre that aims at implementing an advanced tool to support Government Bodies in the discovery and localization of environmental criticalities. In detail, this project will develop a software and hardware platform for image, data and document analysis in order to support law enforcement investigations. The fight against illegal waste dumping is the first objective of the IDES project and the main goal is to develop algorithms for image analysis in order to automatically identify this environmental criticality. The first task is to identify the statistical link between specific features extracted from satellite images or acquired by airborne sensors, possibly in combination with punctual information (results of chemical analysis, physical property measurements, information pertaining to the population), and environmental criticalities (e.g. illegal dumping, illegal landfills etc). IDES will offer an integrated Geographic Information System (GIS) repository of information extracted and collected by various government bodies. Furthermore, an innovative aspect of IDES is the integration between information extracted from remotely sensed images and information extracted from textual documents through a semantic analysis. The results of this last analysis will be a taxonomydriven document searching and browsing system in which all documents are categorized and all relevant entities in documents (e.g. people, organizations, places and events) are extracted and represented by means of concept maps. Finally, these results: a) provide support to government bodies "end-users"; b) can be included in a GIS; c) can constitute the basis for the application of Artificial Adaptive Systems used in the domain of semantic analysis of

In this paper we propose a GIS-based methodology, using optical and SAR remote sensing data, together with more conventional sources, for the detection of small cattle breeding areas, potentially responsible of hazardous littering. This specific environmental problem is very relevant for the Caserta area, in southern Italy, where many small buffalo breeding farms exist which are not even known to the productive activity register, and are not easily monitored and surveyed. Experiments on a test area, with available specific ground truth, prove that the proposed systems is characterized by very large detection probability and negligible false alarm rate