A Detection Method for Collapsed Buildings Combining Post-Earthquake High-Resolution Optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar Images

The detection of collapsed buildings based on post-earthquake remote sensing images is conducive to eliminating the dependence on pre-earthquake data, which is of great significance to carry out emergency response in time. The difficulties in obtaining or lack of elevation information, as strong evidence to determine whether buildings collapse or not, is the main challenge in the practical application of this method. On the one hand, the introduction of double bounce features in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are helpful to judge whether buildings collapse or not. On the other hand, because SAR images are limited by imaging mechanisms, it is necessary to introduce spatial details in optical images as supplements in the detection of collapsed buildings. Therefore, a detection method for collapsed buildings combining post-earthquake high-resolution optical and SAR images was proposed by mining complementary information between traditional visual features and double bounce features from multi-source data. In this method, a strategy of optical and SAR object set extraction based on an inscribed center (OpticalandSAR-ObjectsExtraction) was first put forward to extract a unified optical-SAR object set. Based on this, a quantitative representation of collapse semantic knowledge in double bounce (DoubleBounceCollapseSemantic) was designed to bridge a semantic gap between double bounce and collapse features of buildings. Ultimately, the final detection results were obtained based on the improved active learning support vector machines (SVMs). The multi-group experimental results of post-earthquake multi-source images show that the overall accuracy (OA) and the detection accuracy for collapsed buildings (Pcb) of the proposed method can reach more than 82.39% and 75.47%. Therefore, the proposed method is significantly superior to many advanced methods for comparison.