Harnessing Remote Sensing for Civil Engineering: Then, Now, and Tomorrow

Despite enormous advances in remote sensing data over the past 20 years, harnessing and exploiting that data by the Civil Engineering community has been relatively limited. To understand the full potential of such data, first this paper briefly recaps the Civil Engineering community’s engagement with remote sensing for dike monitoring and post-earthquake damage assessment. Next, the state of the art is introduced with special considerations for recent advances in quality, affordability, accessibility, and equipment size; the role of national aerial laser scanning data collection programs; and the increasing applicability of remote sensing to a wide range Civil Engineering applications. Finally, the paper concludes with a vision of how Civil Engineering can better benefit from existing technologies not regularly exploited today, as well as the logistical challenges of storing and integrating such data in a computationally meaningful manner.