Further advances in automatic mapping of seismic damage based on very high resolution SAR images

Destructive earthquakes challenge Earth Observation (EO) systems to demonstrate their usefulness in supporting intervention and relief actions. The use of EO data for damage assessment purposes has been widely proposed and a number of results have been presented. Our research group intends to contribute on automatization of EO data interpretation in two respects: on the one side, to locate sparse structures subject to post-earthquake inspection to estimate the risk of collapse from aftershocks; on the other side, to estimate the damage level suffered by urban areas. In this paper, the authors build on their experience with the 6th April 2009, Italy earthquake to develop data processing techniques focussing on these two particular applications. The method and the results of preliminary testing on pre- and post-event COSMO/SkyMed images are presented and discussed