Abstract Earth Observation (EO) data are used to map mostly affected urban areas after an earthquake generally exploiting change detection techniques applied at pixel scale. However, Civil Protection Services require damage assessment of each building according to a well-established scale to manage rescue operations and to estimate the economic losses. Considering the earthquake that hit L'Aquila city (Italy) on April 6, 2009, this work assess the feasibility of producing damage maps at the scale of single building from Very High Resolution (VHR) optical images collected before and after the seismic event. We considered the European Macroseismic Scale 1998 (EMS-98) and assessed the possibility to discriminate between collapsed or heavy damaged buildings (damage grade DG equal to 5 in the EMS-98 scale) and less damaged or undamaged buildings (DG The proposed approach relies on a pre-existing urban map to identify image objects corresponding to building footprints. The image analysis is carried out according to many different parameters with the objective of assessing their effectiveness in singling out changes associated to the building collapse. Features describing texture and colour changes, as well statistical similarity and correlation descriptors, such as the Kullbach Leibler Distance and the Mutual Information, were included in our analysis. Two supervised classification approaches, respectively, based on the use of the Bayesian Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) criterion and on Support Vector Machines (SVM), were compared. In our experiment, we considered the whole L'Aquila historical centre comparing classification results with the ground survey performed by the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV). The work represents one of the first attempt to detect damage at the scale of single building, validated against an extensive ground survey. It addresses methodological aspects, highlighting the potential of textural features computed at object scale and SVMs, and discuss potential and limitations of EO in this field compared to ground surveys.

中文翻译：

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地震损害测绘：2009 年拉奎拉地震后地面调查和 VHR 图像变化检测的总体评估

摘要 地球观测 (EO) 数据用于绘制地震后主要受影响的城市地区，通常利用在像素尺度上应用的变化检测技术。但是，民防部门要求根据既定的规模对每栋建筑物进行损坏评估，以管理救援行动并估算经济损失。考虑到 2009 年 4 月 6 日袭击拉奎拉市（意大利）的地震，这项工作评估了从地震事件前后收集的甚高分辨率 (VHR) 光学图像中生成单个建筑物尺度的损坏图的可行性。对基于贝叶斯最大后验 (MAP) 标准和支持向量机 (SVM) 的使用进行了比较。在我们的实验中，我们考虑了整个拉奎拉历史中心，将分类结果与由 Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) 进行的地面调查进行比较。这项工作代表了在单个建筑物的规模上检测损坏的首次尝试之一，并通过广泛的地面调查进行了验证。它解决了方法论方面的问题，强调了在对象尺度和 SVM 上计算的纹理特征的潜力，并讨论了 EO 在该领域与地面调查相比的潜力和局限性。Aquila 历史中心将分类结果与 Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) 进行的地面调查进行比较。这项工作代表了在单个建筑物的规模上检测损坏的首次尝试之一，并通过广泛的地面调查进行了验证。它解决了方法论方面的问题，强调了在对象尺度和 SVM 上计算的纹理特征的潜力，并讨论了 EO 在该领域与地面调查相比的潜力和局限性。Aquila 历史中心将分类结果与 Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) 进行的地面调查进行比较。这项工作代表了在单个建筑物的规模上检测损坏的首次尝试之一，并通过广泛的地面调查进行了验证。它解决了方法论方面的问题，强调了在对象尺度和 SVM 上计算的纹理特征的潜力，并讨论了 EO 在该领域与地面调查相比的潜力和局限性。