Identification of the landslide using the satellite images and the digital image correlation method

Large earthquakes, typhoons and heavy rains often cause the slide of hillside. In recent years, global warming causes the increase of extreme weather and it leads to the raise of the occurrence frequency of landslide disaster. Since most of these disasters occur in the remote mountainous areas and they are often accompanied with traffic interruption, the rescue and investigation works are very difficult to carry out. Digital image correlation (DIC) method is a non-contact optical measurement method. The progress of digital camera and computational capability of computer leads to the wide application of the digital image correlation technique to different research fields. Because the landslides will change the appearance of the ground surface and the satellite images are already widely used in the remote sensing technology, we can use the DIC method and the satellite images to monitor the occurrence of landslide. The principle of digital image correlation method is to identify the positions on two images with the highest correlation. However, landslides lead to a low correlation between two images. Therefore, this study modified the digital images correlation method to find out the positions with low correlation on satellite images. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Digital Elevation Model (DEM) are also used to assist in the reduction of the misidentification.