Damage Degree Evaluation of Earthquake Area Using UAV Aerial Image

Jinhong Chen,Ming Lv,Beibei Yan,Xin Hu,Yun Gao,Haoting Liu,Jingchen Zheng

doi:10.1155/2016/2052603

Abstract

An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system and its aerial image analysis method are developed to evaluate the damage degree of earthquake area. Both the single-rotor and the six-rotor UAVs are used to capture the visible light image of ground targets. Five types of typical ground targets are considered for the damage degree evaluation: the building, the road, the mountain, the riverway, and the vegetation. When implementing the image analysis, first the Image Quality Evaluation Metrics (IQEMs), that is, the image contrast, the image blur, and the image noise, are used to assess the imaging definition. Second, once the image quality is qualified, the Gray Level Cooccurrence Matrix (GLCM) texture feature, the Tamura texture feature, and the Gabor wavelet texture feature are computed. Third, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is employed to evaluate the damage degree. Finally, a new damage degree evaluation (DDE) index is defined to assess the damage intensity of earthquake. Many experiment results have verified the correctness of proposed system and method.

Highlights

The damage degree evaluation (DDE) of nature disaster can provide the intuitionistic support information for the government and the disaster rescue departments [1]
Five typical ground objects are considered for damage degree analysis
Many actual aerial images are used to test the performance of proposed algorithm

Summary

Introduction

The damage degree evaluation (DDE) of nature disaster can provide the intuitionistic support information for the government and the disaster rescue departments [1]. A system and its data processing method to solve the image capture and analysis issues for the earthquake application. A UAV aerial image capture system and its analysis technique are presented. Five typical ground objects are considered for damage degree analysis They include the building, the road, the mountain, the riverway, and the vegetation. If the captured image passes the quality check, a texture analysis computation will be carried out. The main contributions of this paper include the following: First, an integrated UAV application system for earthquake rescue is developed. Two kinds of UAVs are utilized to implement the information collection task; and an interactive intelligent image analysis software system is developed. A new evaluation index, that is, the DDE index, is proposed to assess the damage level of earthquake.

Hardware System Design Method

Proposed Damage Degree Evaluation Method

Experiments and Discussions

Conclusion