A Novel Approach to Landslide Monitoring based on Unmanned Aerial System Photogrammetry

Landslides represent great dangers that can cause fatalities and huge property damage. To prevent or reduce all possible consequences that landslides cause, it is necessary to know the kinematics of the surface and undersurface sliding masses. Geodetic surveying techniques can be used for landslide monitoring and creating a kinematic model of the landslide. One of the most used surveying techniques for landslide monitoring is the photogrammetric survey by Unmanned Aerial System. The results of the photogrammetric survey are dense point clouds, digital terrain models, and digital orthomosaic maps, where landslide displacements can be determined by comparing these results in two measurement epochs. This paper presents a new data processing method with a novel approach for calculating landslide displacements based on Unmanned Aerial System photogrammetric survey data. The main advantage of the new method is that it does not require the production of dense point clouds, digital terrain models, or digital orthomosaic maps to determine displacements. The applicability and accuracy of the new method were tested in a test field with simulated displacements of known values within the range of 20-40 cm in various directions. The new method successfully determined these displacements with a 3D accuracy of +/- 1.3 cm.