Remote sensing monitoring of changes potentially associated to obstacles to air navigation

Correct identification of obstacles at the periphery of airports is an important issue to secure the safety of takeoff, flight, and landing to aircrafts. This work is carried on as part of the obstacle risk assessment and risk mitigation operations in the aviation security context. Specifically, this paper presents a novel methodology to change detection (CD) in pairs of high resolution (HR) ortho-rectified multi-spectral satellite images acquired on the same geographical area at different times. Within this framework, orograph-ic/topographic changes potentially associated with variations in the obstacles to air navigation in wide areas are addressed. In fact, the developed CD strategy consists in a pre-screening technique offering a low-cost and fast solution to strongly reduce the terrain area to be deeply investigated through more expensive very HR imagery or/and detailed ground surveys.