Damage Degree Evaluation of Earthquake Area Using UAV Aerial Image

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.