Extraction of Tsunami Inundation Areas and Damaged Buildings for the 2011 Tohoku, Japan Earthquake from High-resolution SAR images

概要

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The Tohoku earthquake on March 11, 2011, which occurred off the Pacific coast of the northeastern (Tohoku) Japan, caused gigantic tsunamis and brought vast devastation and a huge number of human casualties. Various high-resolution satellites quickly captured the details of affected areas, and were used for emergency response. In this study, the extraction of tsunami inundation areas and damaged buildings were carried out using high resolution pre- and post-event synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Since the water surface generally shows very low backscattering intensity, the inundation areas could be extracted by the difference of SAR backscattered intensity between the pre- and post-event images obtained by TerraSAR-X. Then, the changed buildings were detected by calculating the difference and correlation coefficient in the shape of a building. When a changed building was enclosed by the inundation areas, this building was labeled as a damaged building by tsunami. Finally, the results were compared with visual interoperation results to examine the accuracy of the proposed method.