Extraction of earthquake-induced collapsed buildings using very high-resolution imagery and airborne lidar data

Extraction of urban building damage caused by earthquake disasters, from very-high-resolution (VHR) satellite imagery and related geospatial data, has been widely studied in the past decade. In this study, a multi-stage collapsed building detection method, using bi-temporal (pre- and post-earthquake) VHR images and post-earthquake airborne light detection and ranging (lidar) data, is proposed. Ground objects that are intact and significantly different from collapsed buildings, such as intact buildings, pavements, shadows, and vegetation, were first extracted using the post-event VHR image and lidar data and masked out. Collapsed buildings were then extracted by classifying the combined bi-temporal VHR images and texture images of the remaining area using a one-class classifier, the One-Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM). A post-processing procedure was adopted to refine the obtained result. The proposed method was quantitatively evaluated and compared to two existing methods in Port au Prince, Haiti, which was heavily hit by an earthquake in January 2010. In the two comparative methods, data for the whole study area were directly used. In the first method, collapsed buildings were extracted directly using the OCSVM, while in the second method, buildings and pavements were removed from the extraction result of the first method. The results showed that the proposed method significantly outperformed the existing methods, with increases of 21% and 40%, respectively, in the kappa coefficient. The proposed method provides a fast and reliable method to detect collapsed urban buildings caused by earthquake disasters, and could also be applied to other study areas using similar data combinations.