Abstract
The 11 March 2011 Tohoku, Japan Earthquake caused widespread devastation in the eastern Japan. Crustal movements larger than 5 m were observed on the land after the earthquake. In this study, a method to grasp the surface movement from pre- and post-event TerraSAR-X intensity images was proposed. Since the shifts of non-changed buildings between the two SAR images can be seen as the crustal movements, firstly the buildings in the pre- and post-event images were extracted by a segmentation approach. Then non-changed buildings were detected by matching the buildings in the pre- and post-event images at similar locations. Finally, the shifts were calculated by area-based matching. The method was tested on the TerraSAR-X images of Tohoku region and central Tokyo, and the accuracy was verified by the observed data from GPS ground stations.
