UAV-based approach for municipal solid waste landfill monitoring and water ponding issue detection using sensor fusion

Municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills need regular monitoring to ensure proper operations and meet environmental protection requirements. One requirement is to monitor landfill gas emissions from the landfill cover while another requirement is to monitor the potential settlement and damage to MSW landfill covers. Current surveying methods on a landfill cover are time- and labor-intensive and have limited spatial coverage. Landfill operators and researchers have developed unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based monitoring over recent years; however, UAV-based automatic detection of water ponding in landfills has not been studied. Hence, this study proposes a UAV-based approach to monitor landfills and detect water ponding issues on covers by using multimodal sensor fusion. Data acquired from sensors mounted on a UAV were combined, leading to the creation of a ponding index (PI). This index was used to detect potential ponding sites or areas of topographical depression. The proposed approach has been applied in a case study of a closed MSW landfill before and after Hurricane Ian. A comparison between the generated PI map and a manual survey revealed a satisfactory performance with an IoU score of 70.74%. Hence, the utilization of UAV-based data fusing and the developed PI offers efficient identification of potential ponding areas.