Abstract
The characteristics of collapsed buildings were examined by image processing of aerial television images taken after the 1995 Hyogoken-Nanbu earthquake. Areas with building damage were defined by color indices and edge elements of an original image, and by edge information and statistical textures derived from the co-occurrence matrix of edge intensity. In the latter case not using color indices, the estimated results were in good agreement with the actual distribution of collapsed buildings, and it was relatively easy to apply the threshold values to an adjacent image. As the edge information can be derived from a gray scale image as well as brightness, the proposed method is applicable to the high-resolution panchromatic satellite imagery with one-meter spatial resolution.
