Spectral Analysis of Optical Remote Sensing Images for the Detection of Damage due to The 1999 Kocaeli, Turkey Earthquake

Abstract

The identification of damage due to large is a vital issue to grasp the level and extension of the hard-hit areas. The evaluation can be conducted through a field reconnaissance survey. Even though, the field survey has a high accuracy it requires a lot of resources and time. In the event of large natural disasters, like a desffuctive earthquake, a fast assessment of the damaged areas is required to send off rescue teams and help. Also the awareness of the extension of damage can help to outline recovery plans. Recently remote sensing technology has become a tool in damage identification after the occurrence of natural disasters like floods, landslides or earthquakes (e.g. Matsuoka and Yamazaki, 1999)' The identification of damage from a large area gives.vital information that authorities can use to plan rescue procedures as well as to draw a general idea of the magnitude of the damage. The location of different types of damage like fire outbreak, ground settlement and building damage using optical remote sensing data is considered in this study. In order to identiff the different kinds of damage, the comparison of optical satellite images taken before and after the earthquake is conducted. In this study the area around Gtrlctk city in Turkey has been focused. First, image-to-image registration was carried out to match the images. To detect the fire outbreak we compared the profiles along X-axis and Y-axis of the pre-and post-event images. For the detection of the sunken area the histograms of the infrared band are matched and then the result images are compared. For the detection of different levels of damage an analysis in the visible region is conducted as well as Principal Component Transformation (Yasuoka, 1990). Data for the 1999 Kocaeli