Damage Detection from SAR Imagery : Application to the 2003 Algeria and 2007 Peru Earthquakes

Abstract EN

This paper is focused on the improvement and further validation of a recently proposed approach for the joint use of radar satellite imagery of an area affected by a major disaster and ancillary data.

The study was carried out at different sites on imagery of two different earthquakes occurred one in the Mediterranean coast of Algeria on May 21st, 2003, which severely affected the city of Boumerdes, and one in the Pacific Coast of Peru on August, 15th, 2007.

The combination of different radar-extracted features results in very fuzzy classification of the damage patterns, far less detailed than what available using optical imagery.

However, focused results using the above-mentioned ancillary data provide enough detail and precision to be comparable with them.

In particular, quantized damage level at the block level is achieved at enough detail using ALOS/PALSAR data and thus validates the original idea.