ABSTRACT
The recent availability of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) and the joint use of methodologies provided by geomatics engineering, photogrammetry, and computer vision technologies have established new opportunities for environmental monitoring purposes. This is especially the case for traditional survey applications where labour-intensive investigations are required, such as for coastal environments, where logistic difficulties can compromise the quality of the overall product and make the work of the surveyors difficult. The high-resolution and flexible overflights offered by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sensors make these instruments more suitable for a wide range of coastal applications. In particular, all applications that require investigations at desired periods and revisit times of the coastal settings can benefit from the new paradigm offered by UAV surveys. The objective of this chapter is to acquaint the reader with the potentiality of UAS-based surveys on coastal environments through a discussion of examples available in the very recent literature and through the skills achieved by the authors in this field. After a short introduction on UAV models that can be used to perform aerial surveys and a short description on the available methodologies to process the data acquired by visible and multispectral sensors, this chapter will focus on several UAS applications referred to coastal environments.
