An object oriented approach for quantitative assessment of building damage in urban areas using very high resolution images

Very High Resolution images are particularly well adapted to damage assessment in urban area because on one hand it allows an analysis focused on the buildings solely through an object-oriented analysis, and on the other hand it permits a quantitative evaluation of this damage assessment using a visually established ground truth. We proposed in this paper a method of damage assessment that uses these two benefits. First an original object oriented approach to register the images is presented. Then a simple and fast damage assessment method based on correlation is proposed and tested on several test-cases. Each buildings of a test-area is classified using Support Vector Machines. The performances of the method in each case is evaluated thanks to a manually constructed reference database that uses the European Macroseismic Scale. Our method shows good results, with up to 75% of buildings well classified among four different EMS damage grades.