Remote sensing and omnidirectional imaging for efficient building inventory data-capturing: Application within the Earthquake Model Central Asia

Local governments are often unable to keep track of the building inventory exposed to seismic hazard, due to high urbanization rates and an increasingly high spatio-temporal variability in many present-day cities. In order to provide a time- and cost-efficient approach to estimate building inventory and thus structural vulnerability that allows for assessing and monitoring seismic risk on different scales over large areas, the use of satellite remote sensing in combination with ground-based omnidirectional imaging is tested and applied. Latest image processing and statistical learning algorithms are used on multiple imaging sources in the framework of an integrated sampling scheme. Each imaging source and technique is used to capture specific, scale-dependent information of the exposed building stock. Preliminary results from an application within the Earthquake Model Central Asia (EMCA) are presented.