Earthquake Damage Assessment from VHR Data: Case Studies

Abstract

The assessment of damage caused by earthquakes is of primary importance for emergency planning and human rescue, especially in remote areas where infrastructures are weak and communication systems easily break down after natural disasters. In the last decade, the remote sensing instruments, either spaceborne or airborne sensors (i.e., aerial digital cameras), have demonstrated their capabilities to provide valuable tools for damage mapping purposes, especially thanks to the availability of very high-resolution (VHR) images, characterized by pixel size around 1 m or less which are able to capture highly detailed information of the Earth surface. A wide variety of methodologies can be used to exploit VHR data for building damage assessment, based on visual interpretation approaches, if dealing with optical imagery, and on completely or semiautomated methods as well, especially when Synthetic Aperture Radar is also considered. The following section focuses on some relevant case studies where VHR images were adopted to map damage caused by destructive earthquakes. The dataset, the adopted methods, and the related achievements are presented for each seismic event.