A case study on fusion of seismic damage information from space-borne and ground-based imaging of L´Aquila, 2009 earthquake

This paper describes a combined approach used to assess damage occurred to the city of L´Aquila after the April 2009 earthquake. A survey mission in October 2011 provided the ground images of the most-affected area, still useful because of the substantially unchanged area. Main concept is the fusion of the manual-made interpretation of space-borne satellite imagery along with a ground-based damage analysis, based on the hypothesis of different damage detectability from the two considered sources. Obtained results show improvements in the total accuracy for the proposed hybrid approach confirming the initial hypothesis. This approach can be considered as an attempt to consider the crowd as a source of information (in this case information provided in the form of pictures).