Building damage assessment after the earthquake in Haiti using two post-event satellite stereo imagery and DSMs

In this paper, a novel disaster building damage monitoring method is presented. This method combines the multispectral imagery and DSMs from stereo matching to obtain three kinds of changes. The proposed method contains three basic steps. The first step is to segment the panchromatic images to get the smallest possible homogeneous regions. In the second step, based on a rule based classification using change information from Iteratively Reweighted Multivariate Alteration Detection (IR-MAD) and height, the changes are classified to ruined buildings, new buildings, and changes without height change (mainly temporary residential area, etc. tents). In the last step, a region based grey level co-occurrence matrix texture measurement is used to refine the third change class. The method is applied to building change detection after the Haiti earthquake.