Mining Multispectral Aerial Images for Automatic Detection of Strategic Bridge Locations for Disaster Relief Missions

Abstract

We propose in this paper an image mining technique based on multispectral aerial images for automatic detection of strategic bridge locations for disaster relief missions. Bridge detection from aerial images is a key landmark that has vital importance in disaster management and relief missions. UAVs have been increasingly used in recent years for various relief missions during the natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes and a huge amount of multispectral aerial images are generated by UAVs in the missions. Being a multi- stage technique, our method utilizes these multispectral aerial images for identifying patterns for effective mining of bridge locations. Experimental results on real-world and synthetic images are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, showing that it is 40% faster than the existing Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) systems and can achieve a 95% accuracy. Our technique is believed to be able to help accelerate and enhance the effectiveness of the relief missions carried out during disasters.