In the framework of the royal palace in Munich and of the international conference IGARSS 2012, the most important in the field of remote sensing which includes over two thousand scientists from all over the world, the Italian techniques of image processing for satellite monitoring developed at IREA was rewarded by the IEEE Society. The work "Tomographic Imaging and Monitoring of Buildings with Very High Resolution Data", developed by an Italian-German team composed by Diego Reale, Gianfranco Fornaro and Antonio Pauciullo of IREA-CNR and by Xiaoxiang Zhu and Richard Bamler of the German Space Agency and published in the international journal Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, received the award for the best article of 2011. This work represents a significant advancement in the development of the satellite technology for monitoring the Earth by satellite, by opening an application scenario to the reconstruction and monitoring of single buildings and structures. The application sectors involves the control of deformations of buildings and infrastructure associated with structural defects and exposed to natural and anthropogenic stresses, such as excavation and extraction in subsoil, or extreme events such as earthquakes.
3D reconstruction of the Hotel Mirage in Las Vegas obtained by the technique of multi-dimensional SAR imaging (also known as tomographic SAR) using the very high resolution data of the German satellite TerraSAR-X