Rapid and accurate damage detection in built-up areas combining stripmap and spotlight SAR images

In this paper an approach that exploits and combines the acquisition modes offered by satellite SAR systems is presented that: i) quickly and automatically identifies the areas severely affected by a catastrophic event (i.e., hotspots), such as an earthquake by analyzing images characterized by a large coverage and a medium to high geometrical resolution; and ii) analyzes images characterized by very high geometrical resolution acquired over hot-spots in order to detect collapsed buildings. Experimental results obtained on a dataset made up of COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) data acquired before and after the 2009 L´Aquila earthquake (Italy) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.