Remote Sensing Technology for Earthquake Damage Detection

Remotely sensed imagery data from satellites and airborne platforms have become important tools to assess vulnerability of urban areas and to grasp damage distribution due to natural disasters. The platform and sensors of remote sensing should be selected considering the area to cover, urgency, weather and time conditions, and resolution of images. Satellites with optical and/or SAR sensors can cover much larger areas than other platforms, and hence, they can be used for macro-scale urban modeling and damage detection in large-scale natural disasters. Aerial television imagery, aerial photography and high-resolution satellite imagery are very useful to observe buildings and infrastructures with high resolution. Thus damage detection is possible using only post-event images or both preand post-event images. In this paper, recent developments and applications of remote sensing technologies are reviewed from the viewpoint of earthquake disaster management, including that for energy supply systems.