Thesis (M. Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2002

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering, School of Advanced Technologies

Mapping of the distribution damaged building after earthquake is important to know where is the building that collapsed. Earthquake events are usually of short duration. It is very important to obtain real-time information of building damage in the urban area in order to rescue the people that trapped on the building. In this study, a maximum likelihood classification image is used. An automatic detection method is built for real time monitoring. This method produces distribution map as final output from high- resolution satellite image. Once a high-resolution image obtained after the event, a final output is provided concurrently with existing building damaged situation. At the first stage, a single satellite image is classified to extirpate the extractable classes. Principal component analysis is applied on the image after removing the extractable classes. New image is created by band mathematical operation, which is the division of the first component image to the all band of the image after removing the extractable classes. At the second stage, this new image is classified with the same position of the training data but the classes that correspond to the extractable are pruned. Then, the building damaged level will be presented on the original image. Through this simulation method, damaged buildings are automatically mapped as the presentation of real-time distribution. This method inherits the classification of land cover. This method presents good results for the urban area classes. In particular, the class denoting collapsed buildings agreed well with the actual situation of damaged building, and the application of this method to real-time earthquake disaster management can be expected.