Buildings damage due to the 2013 Haiyan Typhoon

inferred from SAR intensity images

Bruno Adriano , Erick Mas , and Shunichi Koshimura
Graduate School of Engineering, Tohoku University
Aoba 468-1, Aramaki, Aoba-ku, Sendai 980-0845 JAPAN
Email: adriano@geoinfo.civil.tohoku.ac.jp
International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS), Tohoku University

Aoba 468-1, Aramaki, Aoba-ku, Sendai 980-0845 JAPAN

Email: mas@irides.tohoku.ac.jp
Email: koshimura@irides.tohoku.ac.jp

AbstractIn this study, a practical methodology is presented
to classify and map damaged buildings, following the 2013
Super Typhoon Haiyan, using high resolution synthetic aperture
radar (SAR) images and post-event building damage data from
Tacloban city, The Philippines. Considering the relationship of
the radar layover extension between damaged and non-damaged
structures, the method focuses on the changes in the building
radar signature between pre- and post-event SAR scenes. In
addition, the method introduces a new change factor for change
detection analysis. The method was developed and tested using
a 1.0 m resolution COSMO-SkyMed SAR images taken over
Tacloban city, the Philippines. The method proves, with 76%
accuracy in this case, to be suitable for estimating destroyed
buildings.
Index TermsBuilding damage extraction, change detection,
COSMO-SkyMed SAR, 2013 Typhoon Haiyan, .
I. I NTRODUCTION
On early November in 2013, the Super Typhoon Haiyan hit
a portion of the Southeast Asia, in particular the south region
of the Philippines. The super typhoon traveled with a sustained
wind speed of 315 kmh1 and made its rst landfall with
a maximum wind speed of approximately 230 kmh1 over
eastern Samar Island at 4:40 local time (LT) on November
8. Approximately 2 hours later, the typhoon made its second
landfall over Leyte Island at 7:00 LT (Fig. 1). This typhoon
was classied by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC)
as Category 5, which corresponds to a super typhoon type
based on the Safr-Simpson hurricane wind scale. As of April
17, 2014, reports on damage to people registered 6,300 dead,
28,689 injured and 1,061 missing [1].
In emergency response, space-borne Earth observation is
a valuable option for gathering information on the extension
of damaged areas after the occurrence of natural disasters. In
particular, in the aftermath of typhoon events the affected areas
might be covered by clouds, synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
sensors are capable to observe the Earths surface regardless
the weather as well as the daylight conditions. Moreover,
the new generation of SAR sensors such as TerraSAR-X
and COSMO-SkyMed are able to provide detailed surface
information for a single urban structure [2]. Therefore, this
information can be used to evaluate the condition of building
structures after natural disasters.
In this paper, we introduce a methodology to map building
damage This method is based on the changes of the radar
footprint signatures of buildings detected on pre- and post-
event very high-resolution (VHR) SAR imagery. Given a set
of building footprint data, the layover-template area for each
building is estimated from the pre-event SAR scene. Then,
the determined layover-template is used in the post-event SAR
scene to evaluate whether a building was destroyed or is still
likely to be intact. The change detection analysis is conducted
using a set of three change coefcients. Further, a new change
factor for change detection analysis is introduced.
II. S TUDY AREA AND SAR DATA
The study area is Tacloban city, located approximately at
125o 00E, 11o 15N on the northeast of Leyte Island (Fig. 1).
This area was one of the hardest hit places by the typhoon,
which accounted for at least 2,500 of the approximately
6,300 deaths in the Philippines [3]. A eld survey conducted
two months after the event, on mid January 2014, by the
IRIDeS team from Tohoku University reported at least 7 m
of inundation depth at downtown Tacloban [4]. According to
Bricker et. al., [5], storm surge was dominated by wind-driven
near Tacloban. Damage along Taclobans shoreline indicated
waves atop the surge were strong enough to wreck reinforced
concrete structures as shown in Fig. 2(b).
A set of two SAR data from the COSMO-SkyMed (CSK)
X-band sensor were used in this study. A pre-event scene
acquired on August 19, 2013 (Fig. 1(b)) and a post-event scene
acquired on November 20, 2013 (Fig. 1(c)), approximately
12 days after Tacloban city was hit by the typhoon. The
incident angle at the center of the images was 46.1o and
the heading angle was 195.0o . Both CSK images were cap-
tured with HH polarization in descending path (STRIPMAP
HIMAGE mode), and provided as Single-look-complex and
Slant-range (SCSB) data in processing level 1A. A multi-
look processing was applied to reduce the speckle noise;
then the images were geocoded and calibrated by means
of the ENVI/SARscape software. The 90 m Shuttle Radar

978-1-4673-7297-8/15/$31.00 2015
c IEEE 667
 (a) (b) A. Extraction of building layover-templates
Samar
Island Detail in Detail in This procedure is based on the methodology introduced for
1120'N
Fig. 2(b)
Tacloban
Fig.2(a)
estimating building height from SAR images proposed by Liu
et. at., [9], whereby it is enhanced by including eld survey
Leyte
Island measurements to support the estimation of layover boundary.
The layover area for a single building is estimated by shifting
110'N

1250'E
[dB]
+7
200 m
-39
(c)
Detail in
Detail in
Fig. 2(a)
Fig. 2(b)
[dB]
+7
-40
200 m
Fig. 1. (a) Tacloban city. (b) and (c) show the pre- and post-event CSK
intensity images, respectively. The blue and red squares in panels (b) and
(c) show the location of a survived and destroyed building in the study area
(detail in Fig. 2).
Topography Mission (SRTM) dataset (Ver. 2) was used for
the geocoding and orhorectication. The enhanced Lee lter
[6] was applied to the sigma naught CSK intensity images
to reduce speckle effect. To minimize the loss of information
contained in the SAR images, the window size of the lter was
set as 33 pixels. Finally, the CSK images were resampled at
1.0 m/pixel in a square size.
III. M ETHODOLOGY
The characteristics of radar footprint of buildings, layover
areas, are function of the building height and the incidence
angle of the SAR image [7], [8]. This relation has been em-
ployed to estimate building heights using high-resolution SAR
images and GIS vector data [9]. Considering that the layover
area of a collapsed structure reduces because the reduction
of its height; the changes of the backscattering features in
damaged buildings, therefore, are strongly correlated to the
extent of structural destructions [10]. In this study, we take
advantage of this relation to conduct a change analysis for
damage detection using the pre- and post-event CSK images.
First, the method estimates a mask for the layover area of
non-damaged buildings (layover-template) using the pre-event
SAR image and the building footprint vector data. Second,
the estimated layover-template is used as a mask for change
detection analysis. In this part, we introduce a new coefcient
for change detection based on the relation of the difference
in the backscattering, Pearson correlation, and phase-based
correlation coefcients.
its original GIS-footprint in the direction of the sensor, as
shown in Fig. 2. The number of times in the shifting process
depends on the building height. Based on the acquisition
angles of the CSK images, 46.1o incidence angle and 195.0o
heading angle (azimuth), the layover width increases in 0.71
m to the west and in 0.15 m to the south for every 1 m
increase in building height. According to eld observations,
1-story house has a minimum height of approximately 2.5
m. Thus, the initial footprint is shifted assuming a 2.5 m
of building height. In order to estimated the boundary of the
layover area, a threshold was used to classify the CSK image
to a binary format (1 and 0 for high and low backscattering
values). In the binary image, layover area is obtained when
the number of high backscattering pixels is less equal than
40% of the total pixel within the template. In this study,
according to the measured building heights, the threshold
was xed as -2 dB. As examples, Fig. 2(a) shows a two
story building (in downtown Tacloban), which according to
our eld measurements is approximately 6 m height. In this
case the initial footprint was shifted 3 times. Figure 2(b)
shows a destroyed warehouse of approximately 15 m height.
In this case the initial footprint was shifted 8 times. Finally,
to construct a layover-template the estimated layover area is
spatially added to the original building footprint, as shown by
the solid and dashed polygons in Fig. 2.
B. Coefcient for change detection
The estimated layover-template is used to evaluate the
changes on the radar backscattering characteristics between
the pre- and post-event SAR images. The change detection
analysis is conducted using the differences in the backscatter-
ing, correlations, phase-based correlation coefcients between
the pre- and post CSK intensity images that are calculated
from the pixels within the layover-template.
The difference in the backscattering coefcient d in Eq. 1
and the correlation coefcient r in Eq. 2 are derived from the
two ltered images [11].
d = Xi Yi (1)
n
1 i Y )
n1 (Xi X)(Y
i=1
r=   (2)
n 
  n
2  (Yi Y )2
 (Xi X)
i=1 i=1
where n is the number of sets of X and Y , and X and
Y are the arithmetic means of X = {Xi } and Y = {Yi },
respectively.
The phase-based correlation coefcient, also known as
phase-only correlation function (P OC), is dened as follows

668 2015 IEEE 5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar(APSAR)

 (a)
Pre-event 0 30 m Pre-event Photo Post-event Post-event
Post-event Post-event Photo

0 25 m
(a)
Post-event

Ran Ran Ran

ge ge ge
0 30 m 0 30 m
(a)

(b)
Pre-event Pre-event Post-event Post-event

Photo

Ran Ran Ran

ge ge ge
  P   P   P
(b)

Fig. 2. From top to bottom, pre-event, binary pre-event, and post-event SAR images and photos in situ of each damage classication. (a) Two story survived
building located at Tacloban port area. (b) Destroyed warehouse building in downtown Tacloban. The solid polygons show the initial GIS footprint, and the
dashed polygons show the estimated layover area.

[12], [13]. First, consider two images ga and gb . Let Ga and (a) (b)
Gb denote the 2D Discrete Fourier Transforms (2D DFT) of
the two images, as shown by Eqs. 3-4.
Ga = F{ga } (3)
Gb = F{gb } (4)
d [dB]
The cross-spectrum between the 2D-DFT images is cal- +8.3

culated by multiplying element-wise Ga and the complex Survived 0 250 m 0 250 m

conjugate of Gb (Gb ), shown by Eq. 5, where denotes Destroyed -8.9

element-wise product. (c) (d)

Ga Gb
R= (5)
|Ga Gb |
The P OC coefcient is dened as the maximum value from
the modulus of the 2D Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform (2D
IDFT) of R, as shown by Eq. 2. r poc
-1.0 0.0
 
P OC = (F 1 {R})max (6) 0 250 m 0 250 m
+1.0 +1.0

The most exceptional property of P OC coefcient com-

pared to the ordinary correlation is its accuracy in image
matching [12]. In general, when two images are similar, their
POC function gives a peak. On the other hand, when two
images are at some level different, the peak drops signicantly.
Therefore, the height of the peak can be used to measure
similarities or changes between two images [13].
IV. R ESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The positive values of d coefcient indicate a slightly
increment of backscattering signal due to some small changes
on the buildings footprints. This is because after the buildings
rooftops were blown-away by the wind, the exposed walls
generate double-bounce effects creating high backscattering
signals in the SAR images. In contrast, negative values of d
coefcient correspond to buildings where the double-bounce
Fig. 3. (a) GTD. (b) Distribution of the difference in the backscattering
coefcient (d). (c) Distribution of the calculated correlation (r) coefcient.
(d) Distribution of the calculated phase-based correlation (P OC) coefcient.
effect between walls and the ground reduces for collapsed
buildings. On the other hand, r and P OC-coefcients show
high correlation between the pre- and the post-event CSK
images when there are low changes in the radar footprint
signature. This relation can be interpreted as low damage.
In addition, values of r and P OC coefcients closer to 0
indicate low correlation, which can be interpreted as high
damage. Figure 2(a) and (b) show examples of the estimated
layover-template of two different damaged buildings, with
an in situ photo of the same building. In the case of Fig.

2015 IEEE 5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar(APSAR) 669

 (a) 1.5 (b) 100
1.0
Distribution function
0.5
0.0
z
-0.5
-1.0
-1.5
-2.0
Survived Destroyed
Fig. 4. (a) Box plots of the z factor. (b) cumulative distribution function of
the z factor.
2(a), a survived building, d, r, and P OC coefcients were
0.90 dB, 0.81 and 0.34, respectively. The low positive value
of d indicates a slightly increment of backscattering signal,
which may be due to some small changes on the building
rooftop. However, the slightly high values of r and P OC
show a great correlation that indicates low changes in the
radar footprint signature. This therefore can be interpreted as
a Survived, which is consistent with the GTD and the in situ
photo. In the case of Fig. 2(b), a destroyed building, d, r, and
P OC coefcients were 3.63 dB, 0.05 and 0.14, respectively.
Same as the previous case, the positive value of d indicates
some damages within the building footprint. In addition, the
low values of r and P OC coefcients clearly shows high
change between the SAR scenes. It is thus interpreted as a
Destroyed that is also consistent with the GTD and the in
situ photo.
Figure 3 shows the comparison between the GTD and the
calculated coefcients in the study area. The distribution of d
and P OC coefcients show good correlation with the GTD
in areas of minor damages. For low changes, values closer to
0 in case of d, and values closer to 1 in case of P OC and r
are mainly concentrated in areas of minor damages. In areas
highly damaged, although P OC shows better correlation, both
coefcients do not show good correlation with the GTD.
On the other hand, the distribution of r coefcient shows
higher correlation with the GTD in areas highly damaged
Destroyed as well as areas of minor damages Survived.
Thus, considering the relation between the change coefcients
and the GTD, we introduce a change factor (z) for damage de-
tection. The z factor is calculated from the lineal combination
of d, r, and P OC coefcients, as shown in Eq. 7.
z = r + 0.5 P OC 0.25
To analyze the relationship between the proposed z factor
and the damages levels (survived and destroyed), we randomly
select 300 building from each damage class as a training sam-
ple. Figure 4 shows box plots of the range of z values and the
building damage levels. Building with damage level survived
tend to have higher z values. Furthermore, buildings classied
as destroyed shows smaller values of z factor. Next, the
appropriate threshold value used to classify into two classes
were determined using the cumulative frequency distribution
670 2015 IEEE 5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar(APSAR)
(a)
Survived
Destroyed
80
60
40
20
0.72
0
-2.0 -1.5 -1.0 -0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5
z
GTD
0 250 m Survived
Destroyed
(b)
Model
0 250 m Survived
Destroyed
Fig. 5. Result of building damage mapping in Tacloban city. (a) GTD in the
study area. (b) Mapping result obtained from the z factor using a threshold
equal to 0.719.
of z from each damage class (Fig. 4(b)). The threshold was
selected as the value where the difference between their
cumulative frequency distributions is maximized. This method
gives the most probable value to divide two classes [14]. Using
this method, the threshold to identify damaged areas is set as
0.719.
Finally, the proposed change factor between the pre- and
post-event SAR images was used to map destroyed buildings
in Tacloban city after the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan. Figure 5
shows the comparison between the damage mapping result and
the GTD. The spatial distribution of damage buildings (Fig.
5(b)) slightly underestimates the damage observed in the GTD
(Fig. 5(a)). For instance, the area to the north of downtown
Tacloban shows slightly minor number of destroyed buildings.
d
(7) This might be because footprint sizes of houses located at
max|d| this area are relatively small to be well represented in the
SAR images. In addition, based on the post-event eld survey
[4], the houses at this area were rapidly reconstructed few
days after the event, which might cause the false detection
from a post-event SAR image acquired almost two weeks after
the event when several houses were informally re-constructed.
In case of downtown Tacloban, in general, the model results
agrees well the GTD. An accuracy analysis using the total
number of buildings in the study area (2,741 buildings) gives
an overall accuracy of 75.7%.
 V. C ONCLUSION
In this study, a method to detect and map building damage
using a pre- and post-event SAR image was presented. The
method focused on the changes of building radar footprints
between the pre-and post-event SAR scene. The method calcu-
lated a layover-template using the pre-event SAR scene and the
building footprints. Then, the estimated layover-template was
used to extract the pixels values from both SAR scenes. The
extracted pixels were used to calculate the change coefcients
(d, r, and P OC). Finally, based on the relationship between
the damage classes and the change coefcients, a change factor
(z) was introduced for change detection analysis. This method
was tested using a 1.0 m resolution COSMO-SkyMed SAR
images of Tacloban city, the Philippines following the 2013
Typhoon Haiyan. The accuracy assessment of the results shows
that our method is generally useful for estimating building
damages with an overall accuracy of 76%
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was supported by the International Research
Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS) grant and the Min-
istry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
(MEXT) grant.
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