<title>Satellite image GIS for rapid damage assessment</title>

Abstract

A system architecture for rapid and reliable emergency response in consequence of suddenly occurring natural disaster is conceived and described throughout this paper. The final goal of the developed methodology is the integration, within a single user interface environment, of data access and standardization techniques, image processing tools, GIS technology, analytical modeling and communication tools. This would allow to sensibly reduce the effects of the earthquake disaster by providing an immediate estimate of the extent and location of the suffered area and making this knowledge available to the responsible agencies. In particular, attention is focused on the implementation of the above system architecture distinguishing between local and central nodes in order to gain effectiveness and to optimize the reaction time for an efficient and rapid emergency response. The local nodes are located in the single municipalities and consists of personal computers where the spatial and tabular databases are collected and stored. The central node consists of a Unix workstation where the GIS software and the image processing tools are resident.