NHESSD Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences Discussions NHESSD Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss. 2195-9269 Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/nhess-2018-73 An Automated Technique for Damage Mapping after Earthquakes by Detecting Changes between High-Resolution Images Ci Tianyu 1 Liu Zhen 2 Wang Ying 3 Lin Qigen 4 Wu Di 5 College of Global Change and Earth System Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China Center of Information and Network Technology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disaster of MOE, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China Academy of Disaster Reduction and Emergency Management, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China Heilongjiang Geomatics center of China Bureau of Surveying and maping, Harbin, China 10 04 2018 2018 1 19 Copyright: © 2018 Tianyu Ci et al. 2018 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://nhess.copernicus.org/preprints/nhess-2018-73/ The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://nhess.copernicus.org/preprints/nhess-2018-73/nhess-2018-73.pdf

Improving the speed and accuracy of earthquake disaster loss evaluations is very important for disaster response and rescue. This paper presents a new method for urban damage assessments after earthquake disasters by using a change detection technique between bi-temporal (pre- and post-event) high-resolution optical images. A similarity index derived from a pair of images was used to extract the characteristics of collapsed buildings. In this paper, the methods are illustrated using two case studies. Our results confirmed the effectiveness and precision of the proposed technique with optical data of the damage presented using a block scale.

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