Earthquake Damage Assessment using Multi Temporal Satellite Images

The work presented here is concerned with the problem of Earthquake damage assessment using multi temporal satellite images. Earthquake is one of the unavoidable natural hazards that cause lots of damages and problems to the economy, environment and the whole life of the people. After earthquakes, there is a need for rapid, accurate and reliable damage information in the critical post event hours to guide response activities. Disaster damage assessment using remotely sensed data can be carried out using the multi temporal approach, which requires two images pre-damage and post-damage of the affected area that are compared to identify changes. In the present work, we have performed the image fusion and image change detection for precise Earthquake damage assessment. We have proposed an IHS and Wavelet transform based integrated image fusion technique for fusion of pre and post panchromatic and multispectral satellite images. The resultant pre and post fused images of earthquake disaster are the input to the image change detection method. We have also proposed a novel Minimum Description Length (MDL) based method for change detection in pre and post images of the earthquake. The results generated by the image fusion and change detection methods are quite helpful for earthquake damage assessment.