Earthquake-induced building damage recognition from unmanned aerial vehicle remote sensing using scale-invariant feature transform characteristics and support vector machine classification

Building damage is the main cause of casualties and economic losses from earthquakes. Therefore, understanding building damage is critical for emergency handling. Current information acquisition methods for assessing earthquake damage using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing systems offer great flexibility and high efficiency with the capability to obtain high-resolution images, which can reflect actual damage to affected areas intuitively. Consequently, UAV remote sensing has become a convenient and important means to acquire earthquake-induced building damage information. Although manual visual interpretation can achieve high recognition accuracy, it is extremely time-consuming. In contrast, although current automatic recognition methods require less time, they have relatively poor recognition accuracy. Neither approach can satisfactorily simultaneously meet efficiency and accuracy requirements for earthquake emergency handling. This article applies image classification algorithms based on the support vector machine (SVM) to earthquake-induced building damage recognition, and proposes a recognition method based on scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) characteristics and SVM classification. We use the magnitude 6.4 earthquake at Yangbi (2021) as an example to validate the proposed method. Results verify that the proposed method can recognize earthquake damage quickly and accurately, providing effective support for decision-making regarding rescue actions.