Assessing Complex Damage Using Pre-Disaster Optical and Post-Disaster Polsar Data

Abstract

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Combining pre-disaster optical and post-disaster synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is regarded as desirable for timely damage assessment, which is essential for the prompt rescue operation. Due to the extreme differences between the two data, however, this combination has not been practically used in the previous research. In this paper, a method to assess the various types of damage caused by disasters using the desirable data combination, particularly pre-disaster very high resolution optical data and post-disaster polarimetric SAR data. The proposed method is a rule-based classification, and uses diverse components derived from the two data such as normalized difference vegetation index, polarization orientation angle, SPAN, and entropy. The proposed method was applied to the case study of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. The experimental results demonstrated the potential of the proposed method to assesses the types of tsunami-induced damage in urban and vegetated areas. The achievement in this paper is expected to facilitate efficient and fast disaster-induced complex damage assessment.</p>

Extraction of Earthquake Damage Information and Mapping of Buildings from Single Post-earthquake Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar Image Based on Polarimetric Decomposition and Texture Features

“…(11) With the increasing abundance of PolSAR data sources, many scholars have applied PolSAR to post-earthquake disaster identification because of its effectiveness in identifying ground objects. (12)(13)(14) In remote areas, it is difficult to obtain PolSAR data sources in pre-earthquake images, but the information contained in PolSAR data is sufficient for the task of damage identification of earthquakes based on single-temporal data; hence, recently, a continuously increasing number of scholars are beginning to use only the single-temporal post-earthquake data to identify the damage of buildings. Moreover, many experiments show that the identification results of this method can meet the accuracy and speed requirements of earthquake damage identification, and the identification accuracy is comparable to that of multitemporal SAR data.…”