ABSTRACT

Due to the casualties and economic losses that can be caused by building collapse after an earthquake, building damage assessment is a very important part of earthquake disaster evaluation. As a result of the advantages of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) imaging, both the accuracy and speed of the damage assessment can be guaranteed in the process of building damage identification using a single post-earthquake PolSAR image. The number of collapsed buildings is usually overestimated when adopting the traditional method, which is because the scattering mechanism is similar to that of intact oriented buildings. In view of this, the variable coefficient of angle domains based on the Fourier amplitude spectrum parameter (CV_AFI) is proposed to ameliorate the damaged building overestimation. By combining the improved Yamaguchi four-component decomposition method with the CV_AFI parameter, the proposed method can be used to extract building damage information from a single PolSAR image. With the Ms 7.1 Yushu earthquake in China as the research case, compared with the traditional method, the producer’s accuracy of the proposed method for undamaged buildings was increased by 38.87%. The proposed method can obtain a higher accuracy of building damage information extraction and significantly reduce building damage overestimation.