IDES project: an advanced tool to investigate illegal dumping

Abstract

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

GIS and infrared aerial view: advanced tools for the early detection of environmental violations

“…by means of a capture, extraction and analysis process. Based upon the integrated information stored in a Geographic Information System and elaborated with the aid of advanced data analysis techniques and tools, IDES is able to extract the hidden information, that is information non immediately identifiable through a mere reading or a deeper analysis, even if performed by a domain expert; at this end, IDES is able to uncover patterns, multi-disciplinary correlations not known a priori and to extract relevant information useful for Government Bodies, Persechino et al [3]. This paper introduces a first example of the combined use of GIS system and the advanced analysis of data sampled on the field; in detail we focused our activities in the development of a new method for the discovery of wastes buried illegally in quarries, small lakes and farmland.…”

Detection of environmental hazards through the feature-based fusion of optical and SAR data: a case study in southern Italy

“…Experiments on a test area, with available specific ground truth, prove that the proposed system is characterized by very large detection probability and a negligible false alarm rate. The research, carried out in the context of a large regional project (Persechino et al 2013) aimed at contrasting environmental crime, benefited from continuous interaction with various institutions and gathered a variety of complementary scientific skills, leading to the implementation of an efficient and user-friendly software tool.…”

Quantifying the environmental impact of pollutant plumes from coastal rivers with remote sensing and river basin modelling

“…There are several other remote-sensing data products that can be used in the environmental monitoring, including fusion of optical data with synthetic aperture radar data to detect cattle ranching [32] and use of thermal imagery to monitor landfills [33] and detect illegal dumping [34]. In addition, remote-sensing data can be strategically combined with other data layers in geographic information systems to monitor the vulnerability of cultural sites [35] and anticipate environmental violations [36].…”