The use of remote sensing for building damage assessment following 22 nd February 2011 Christchurch earthquake : the GEOCAN study and its validation

This Report was commissioned by the GEM Foundation as a component of the GEM Inventory Data Capture Tools (IDCT Project). Funding came from the GEM Foundation through IDCT, and additional funding was provided by the Willis Research Network. The report discusses methods for the application of remote sensing in post-earthquake damage assessment, and reports on a GEOCAN crowd-sourcing study following the 22.2.2011 Christchurch event, and its validation using field studies. It describes the principal datasets used, discusses in detail the problems of validation, and considers the extent of omission and commission errors. It is clear that although commission errors in the GEOCAN damage estimation are low, there are significant omission errors; the extent of these and the factors affecting the extent of omission errors are analysed with a decision model. Recommendations to improve the performance of GEOCAN in subsequent deployments are made.