Dammaged building identifying from VHR satellite imagery using morphological operators in 2011 Pacific coast of Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami

The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake occurred 130km off the northeast coast of Japan in the Pacific Ocean near the Japan Trench and it triggered huge Tsunami, which caused damaged along 600km of coastline. Estimation of tsunami impact on buildings from this event is important for quick response for evaluation and the reconstruction process. This study presents a methodology for an automated damaged buildings detection algorithm using an object recognition task based on Differential Morphological Profile for Very High Resolution (VHR) remotely sensed satellite images. The proposed approach involves morphological operators among which adaptive varying specific sizes, shape and gray level of the structuring elements. GeoEye-1 and IKONOS satellite images consisting of a pre and post 2011 Pacific coast Tohoku earthquake and tsunami site of the Ishinomaki area in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan were used. Morphological operations of opening and closing with construction were applied for segmented images. The Random Forest classification method was used for the building extraction and the results comparison with ground truth data.