Disaster damage assessment for buildings using self-similarity descriptor

Assessment of damage caused by an earthquake is significant for coordinating emergency response teams and planning emergency aid. In this study, a robust method is proposed for detecting damaged buildings using pre- and post-event satellite images and building footprints. The method uses local self-similarity descriptor for change detection in buildings, which is shown to be robust against variations in illumination and small local deformations. The use of building footprints helps reduce the false alarms due to changes in non-building areas. The 2010 Haiti earthquake is analyzed with the suggested method and 72% true positive rate and 29% false positive rate are obtained for detection of collapsed buildings with respect to the ground truth data of UNITAR/UNOSAT.