Earthquake Damage Assessment Using Objective Image Segmentation: A Case Study of 2010 Haiti Earthquake

In this study, we perform a case study on imagery from the Haiti earthquake that evaluates a novel object-based approach for characterizing earthquake induced surface effects of liquefaction against a traditional pixel based change technique. Our technique, which combines object-oriented change detection with discriminant/categorical functions, shows the power of distinguishing earthquake-induced surface effects from changes in buildings using the object properties concavity, convexity, orthogonality and rectangularity. Our results suggest that object-based analysis holds promise in automatically extracting earthquake-induced damages from high-resolution aerial/satellite imagery.