Developing Semi-automated Tool to Detect Tsunami Flooded Areas using Synthetic Aperture Radar

Abstract

A semi-automated tool for detecting tsunami flooded areas is developed using high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar data (TerraSAR-X) focusing on the 2011 Tohoku earthquake tsunami event. A number of flood detection techniques proposed in previous studies have not been fully utilized for emergency responses due to their complicated procedures for image processing. Therefore, this study aimed at solving this problem by developing a semi-automated tool to detect flooded areas with a simple interface. The model was applied to Sendai plain and demonstrated a good performance showing producer's accuracy of 94.2 % and user's accuracy of 93.8 %.