Building Damage Detection using SAR Images in the 2010 Haiti Earthquake

Radar remote sensing, as in SAR, is an independent of daylight and cloud cover and hence has found wide applications including damage detection. The Haiti earthquake (Mw=7) on January 12, 2010 caused widespread casualty and damage to infrastructures in many parts of the country including the capital city Port-au-Prince. 217,000 people were killed making this one of the deadliest earthquakes in the modern times. Building damage detection was performed using very high-resolution preand post-event SAR imageries from TerraSAR-X. Radar characteristics like the correlation coefficient and the backscattering difference between the two SAR images taken in different times were calculated. To find out the building damage in the densely populated settlements as in Port-au-Prince, the threshold values of the correlation coefficient and backscattering difference were suggested and then efficiency of these thresholds was evaluated by overlaying on the optical satellite images. Building damages could be observed even in the dense urban setting of Port-au-Prince.