Use of high-resolution SAR intensity images for damage detection from the 2010 Haiti earthquake

Abstract

Radar remote sensing, as in SAR, is an independent of daylight and cloud cover and hence has found wide applications including damage detection. The Haiti earthquake (Mw=7) on January 12, 2010 caused widespread casualty and extensive damage to structures including the capital city Port-au-Prince. 217,000 people lost their lives due to this event. Building damage detection was performed using very high-resolution pre- and post-event SAR imageries from TerraSAR-X. Radar characteristics like the correlation coefficient and the backscattering difference between the two SAR images taken in different times were calculated. To find out the building damage in the densely populated settlements as in Port-au-Prince, the threshold values of the correlation coefficient and backscattering difference were suggested and then efficiency of these thresholds was evaluated by overlaying on the optical satellite images. Then building damages could be observed even in the dense urban setting of Port-au-Prince.