The next PhDTalks seminar will take place on Tuesday, 15 October in Fassò room (Building 4A), from 5:15 pm to 6:30 pm CET.

PhDTalks is a series of seminars and discussions among PhD students. The events aim to provide a space for networking among doctoral candidates and to showcase the various projects developed within our department.

The speaker, Erika Piaser, will present a seminar titled “AQUA-LIDAR: A novel and open source semi-automatic workflow for LiDAR DSM reconstruction in aquatic scenarios.” A small refreshment, funded by the department, will be available at the end of the event. The seminar will also be available to follow online at the following link.

Abstract

The need for high-resolution, three-dimensional water surface mapping in coastal environments is critical for accurately assessing the intricate interactions between environmental dynamics and anthropogenic activities. Traditional optical sensors struggle in providing accurate and complete digital surface models (DSMs) at the interface between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Single-wavelength LiDAR, though useful for generating 3D point clouds, results in laser dropouts over water bodies, due to strong absorption of water in the near-infrared spectrum. AQUA-LIDAR is a four step semi-automatic workflow for high-resolution DSM reconstruction in aquatic environments, using unsupervised machine learning and LiDAR-derived features. The proposed workflow was evaluated over six different, real-world aquatic scenarios representing a range of challenging conditions.

Speaker’s bio

Erika holds an MSc in Environmental and Land Planning Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, in 2020. She is currently a PhD candidate in Environmental and Infrastructure Engineering (37th cycle) and has recently completed a four-year research fellowship with the Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment, part of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-IREA). Her research focuses on a range of Earth Observation applications for monitoring wetlands and aquatic environments at different scales. Specifically, she is mainly working on addressing ultra-high resolution UAV radiometric and geometric distortions on aquatic vegetation. In her free time, she enjoys watercolour painting and hiking up in the mountains with friends, always fueled by her passion for polenta.