An Automatic Procedure for Early Disaster Change Mapping Based on Optical Remote Sensing

Disaster change mapping, which can provide accurate and timely changed information (e.g., damaged buildings, accessibility of road and the shelter sites) for decision makers to guide and support a plan for coordinating emergency rescue, is critical for early disaster rescue. In this paper, we focus on optical remote sensing data to propose an automatic procedure to reduce the impacts of optical data limitations and provide the emergency information in the early phases of a disaster. The procedure utilizes a series of new methods, such as an Optimizable Variational Model (OptVM) for image fusion and a scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) constraint optical flow method (SIFT-OFM) for image registration, to produce product maps including cloudless backdrop maps and change-detection maps for catastrophic event regions, helping people to be aware of the whole scope of the disaster and assess the distribution and magnitude of damage. These product maps have a rather high accuracy as they are based on high precision preprocessing results in spectral consistency and geometric, which compared with traditional fused and registration methods by visual qualitative or quantitative analysis. The procedure is fully automated without any manual intervention to save response time. It also can be applied to many situations.