Automated detection of damaged buildings in post-disaster scenarios: a case study of Kahramanmaraş (Türkiye) earthquakes on February 6, 2023

This study develops a novel approach for identifying buildings that were damaged in the aftermath of the Kahramanmaraş earthquakes on February 6, 2023, which were among the most devastating in the history of Türkiye. The approach involves using two pre-event and one post-event Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 images to detect changes in the varying-sized and shaped buildings following the earthquakes. The approach is based on the hypothesis that the radiometric characteristics of building pixels should change after an earthquake, and these changes can be detected by analysing the spectral distance between the building pixel vectors before and after the earthquake. The proposed approach examines the changes in building pixel vectors on pre-event and post-event Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument images. It also incorporates the backscattering features of Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar images, as well as the variance image, a feature that is derived from a Grey-Level Co-occurrence Matrix, and the Normalized Difference Built-up Index image, which were derived from the optical data. The approach was tested on three sites, two of which were in Kahramanmaraş and the third in Hatay city. The results showed that the proposed method was able to accurately identify damaged and undamaged buildings with an overall accuracy of 75%, 84.4%, and 73.8% in test sites 1, 2, and 3, respectively. These findings demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach to effectively identify damaged buildings in post-disaster situations.