DETECTION OF BUILDING DAMAGES DUE TO THE 2001 GUJARAT, INDIA EARTHQUAKE USING SATELLITE REMOTE SENSING

摘要

In this paper, we present a method of earthquake damage detection, in which optical images with multi-spectral bands are compared, for the Gujarat, India earthquake, which occurred on January 26, 2001. We investigated the pre- and post-earthquake satellite images by calculating the differences in the reflection intensities (digital numbers) of the two images. The estimated damaged area was abstracted on a pixel unit based on the obtained frequency distributions of the differences in the optical sensor values, which showed significant changes in the reflectance due to the earthquake disaster. We investigated the accuracy of our analytical results using a classification method for estimating damaged area based on training data with aerial photographs taken after the earthquake and the damage distribution estimated from SAR images. The damaged areas estimated by all methods are very similar. By presenting a successful method for damage detection using optical images, we confirmed that satellite remote sensing is a very powerful tool for detecting earthquake damage over a large area.