Multi Temporal Image Fusion of Earthquake Satellite Images

Abstract

The work presented here is concerned with the problem of Earthquake damage assessment using multi temporal satellite images. Remotely sensed data can provide valuable information for disaster assessment such as Earthquakes, Volcanic Eruptions, Landslides, Floods, Storm Surge, Hurricanes, Fires and Drought etc. Earthquake is one of the unavoidable natural hazards that cause lots of damages and problems to the economy, environment and the whole life of people. Prevention of earthquake is rarely achieved and such events continue to pose increasing threat to life and property. After the earthquakes, there is a need for rapid, accurate and reliable damage information in the critical post event hours to guide response activities. Disaster damage assessment using remotely sensed data can be carried out using multi temporal approach, which requires two images pre-damage and post-damage of the affected area that are compared to identify changes. However, the quality of the satellite images is not good as required to identify the changes. Therefore, image fusion methods are used to enhance the quality of the images. In the present work, we have performed the image fusion based quality enhancement of Earthquake satellite images. We have proposed an IHS and Wavelet transform based integrated image fusion technique for fusion of pre and post panchromatic and multispectral satellite images. We have also performed the comparison of proposed integrated technique with other techniques and the results of the proposed approach are quite promising.

 

Keywords: image fusion; damage assessment; wavelet transform; IHS; remote sensing