Use of satellite SAR intensity imagery for detecting building areas damaged due to earthquakes

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is remarkable for its capability to record the backscattering coefficient, the physical value of the earth's surface, regardless of weather condition or sun illumination. Therefore, SAR is a powerful tool that can be utilized to develop a universal method to comprehend damaged areas in disasters such as earthquakes, forest fires, and floods. We performed a feasibility study on backscattering characteristics of damaged areas in the 1995 Hyogoken-Nanbu (Kobe), Japan, earthquake using the pre- and post-event ERS images, revealing that the backscattering coefficient and intensity correlation between the two attained values were significantly lowered in hard-hit areas. The evaluation, however, was performed without speckle noise reduction. We also investigated the effects of speckle noise reduction and pixel-window size in evaluating building damage using the difference in the backscattering coefficient and correlation coefficient of the pre- and post-event ERS images. From the analysis, an optimum window size for the damage evaluation was obtained. It was also found that the accuracy of damage detection is not significantly improved for speckle-reduction filtering of window size larger than 21X21 pixels. We developed an automated method to detect hard-hit areas based on the discriminant analysis, and compared the detected distribution with a damage survey result.