Fast building damage mapping using a single post-earthquake PolSAR image: A case study of the 2010 Yushu earthquake 4. Seismology

Abstract

Earthquakes are one of the most destructive natural disasters. Efficiently and quickly acquiring building earthquake damage information can help to reduce the casualties after an earthquake. In this paper, for convenience, speed, and precision, building damage information is extracted using a single post-earthquake PolSAR image. In PolSAR images, the undamaged parallel buildings characterized by double-bounce scattering are different from the collapsed buildings characterized by volume scattering, but the undamaged oriented buildings are very similar to collapsed buildings because of their scattering mechanism ambiguity in the early traditional model-based decomposition. Therefore, the collapsed buildings are difficult to extract accurately. In this paper, the scheme of polarization orientation angle (POA) compensation is employed to enhance the double-bounce scattering power of the oriented buildings, and the difference in the relative contribution change rate of scattering components before and after POA compensation is proposed to further enhance the difference between collapsed buildings and oriented buildings, in order that the collapsed buildings can be extracted more accurately. The "4.14" Yushu earthquake, which occurred in Yushu County, Qinghai province of China, is used as the case study to test the proposed method, and an airborne high-resolution PolSAR image of the urban region of Yushu County is used in the experiment. The experimental results show that the accuracy of building damage information extraction can be improved by the use of the proposed method, compared with the traditional polarimetric classification.