Geomatics tools to record 3D shapes for intervention planning

The paper offers a state of art of Geomatics tools that it is possible to use after a natural and/or human disaster on urban centers or natural landscapes to record the 3D shape. This knowledge is important both for first aid initiatives devoted to safeguard human lives and for support decision on first technical interventions. The same data, if correctly recorded, are the basic step to plan recovering actions and reconstruction strategies. The high automation level of the metric survey techniques open unsolved questions about the correct use of automatic tools both to acquire primary data and the appropriate management of them to give affordable and accurate metric information to the specialists. Image based technologies (e.g. 3D photogrammetry, SFM) and range based instruments (e.g. terrestrial and aerial laser scanning systems) are analyzed in terms of best rules to acquire the necessary primary data by highlighting the most common mistakes that automation approach could generate; the same analysis is developed for the software used to manage those primary data where automation processing are in many cases not well understood. A more skilled use of primary data acquisition instruments and management software will allow a better quality of the resulting 3D models also considering the real needs in the different phases of the emergency after disasters.