Monitoring the Recovery Process of the Disaster-affected Areas – Scaling Context Image Analysis in Geo Grid-based Solution

This paper presents a new remotely sensed solution for monitoring the recovery of a large disaster-affected area. It exploits the powerful data grid and computing grid technologies developed on GEO (Global Earth Observation) Grid system. Accessing the ASTER portal site of GEO Grid, all the necessary ASTER multi-spectral images and on-demand ASTER digital elevation model (DEM) are easily and quickly collected. Subsequently, satellite images are automatically analyzed on a grid-based computing mechanism. The core processing is a newly developed context-based mapping approach named scaling context image analysis. Phanga province of Thailand, which was strongly attacked by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, is selected as the demonstration site. Four ASTER data sets acquired on November 15, 2002 (pre-event); December 31, 2004 (just after-event); February 8, 2005 and January 26, 2006 (post-event) are used. The efficiency in data collection and data computation is the merit of the proposed solution.