Assessing complex damage using pre-disaster optical and post-disaster polsar data

Abstract

Combining pre-disaster optical and post-disaster synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is regarded as desirable for timely damage assessment, which is essential for the prompt rescue operation. Due to the extreme differences between the two data, however, this combination has not been practically used in the previous research. In this paper, a method to assess the various types of damage caused by disasters using the desirable data combination, particularly pre-disaster very high resolution optical data and post-disaster polarimetric SAR data. The proposed method is a rule-based classification, and uses diverse components derived from the two data such as normalized difference vegetation index, polarization orientation angle, SPAN, and entropy. The proposed method was applied to the case study of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. The experimental results demonstrated the potential of the proposed method to assesses the types of tsunami-induced damage in urban and vegetated areas. The achievement in this paper is expected to facilitate efficient and fast disaster-induced complex damage assessment.