Earthquake Damage Assessment of Buildings Using VHR Optical and SAR Imagery

Rapid damage assessment after natural disasters (e.g. earthquakes, floods) and violent conflicts (e.g. war-related destruction) is crucial for initiating effective emergency response actions. Remote sensing satellites equipped with very high resolution (VHR) multispectral and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging sensors can provide vital information due to their ability to map affected areas of interest with high geometric precision and in an uncensored manner. In this paper, we present a novel method that detects buildings destroyed in an earthquake using pre-event VHR optical and post-event detected VHR SAR imagery. First, the 3D parameters of a building are estimated from the pre-event optical imagery. Second, the building information and the acquisition parameters of the VHR SAR scene are used to predict the expected signature of the building in the post-event SAR scene assuming that it would not be affected by the event. Third, the similarity between the predicted image and the actual SAR image is analyzed. If the similarity is high, the building is likely to be still intact, while a low similarity indicates that the building is destroyed. A similarity threshold is used to classify the individual buildings. We demonstrate the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed method for a subset of the city of YingXiu, China, which was heavily damaged in the Sichuan earthquake of 12 May, 2008. For the experiment we use Quickbird pre-event optical imagery, and TerraSAR-X and CosmoSkyMed post-event SAR data. Post-event QuickBird and WorldView-1 imagery as well as ground photography is used as reference data.

BRUNNER Dominik;  LEMOINE Guido;  BRUZZONE Lorenzo; 

2010-07-22

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC

JRC52620

0196-2892,   

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5411791&tag=1,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC52620,   

10.1109/TGRS.2009.2038274,