X-B3, 2012 
MORPHOLOGICAL HIT-OR-MISS TRANSFORM BASED APPROACH FOR BUILDING 
DAMAGE ESTIMATION FROM VHR AIRBORNE IMAGERY IN 2011 PACIFIC COAST 
OF TOHOKU EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI 
Chandana Dinesh Kumara Parape^', H. Chinthaka N. Premachandra®, Masayuki Tamura°, Masami Sugiura “ 
* Department of Urban and Environmental Engineering, 
Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University, Japan 
? Department of Electrical Engineering, Tokyo University of Science, Tokyo, Japan 
* Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies, 
Kyoto University, Japan 
? Asia Disaster Reduction Center, Kobe, J apan 
Commission ICWG III/VII 
KEY WORDS: Mathematical Morphological Operators, Hit-or-Miss Transform, Natural Hazard, VHR Airborne Images, Building 
Extraction. 
ABSTRACT: 
The very high resolution (VHR) airborne images offer the opportunity to recognize features such as road, vegetation, buildings and 
other kind of infrastructures. The advantage of remote sensing and its applications made it possible to extract damaged, undamaged 
building and vulnerability assessment of wide urban areas due to a natural disaster. In this paper, we focus on an automatic building 
detection method which is helpful to optimizing, recognizing, rescuing, recovery and management tasks in the event of a disaster. 
Objective of this study is to develop techniques for tsunami damaged building extraction, based on very high resolution (VHR) 
airborne images acquired before and after the 2011 East coastline of Japan among Tohoku area and to carry out a damage assessment 
of building and vulnerable area mapping. This paper presents a methodology and results of evaluating damaged buildings detection 
algorithm using an object recognition task based on Mathematical Morphological (MM) operators for Very High Resolution (VHR) 
remotely sensed airborne images. The proposed approach involves several advanced morphological operators among which an 
adaptive hit-or-miss transform with varying size and shape of the structuring elements. VHR airborne images consisting of pre and 
post 2011 Pacific coast of Tohoku earthquake and Tsunami site of the Ishinomaki, Miyagi area in Japan were used. The extracted 
results of building were compared with ground truth data giving 76% and 88% in accuracy before and after the Tsunami event. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
With the increase of natural hazards on urban areas in recent 
years, space borne and airborne remote sensing has been an 
important tool used for recognizing, rescuing, recovery and 
managing tasks in the event of a disaster. In the past decade, 
many kinds of method have developed especially for geometric 
classification and feature extraction. The VHR remote sensing 
images offer the opportunity to recognize features such as road, 
vegetation, buildings and other kind of infrastructures. 
Automatic extraction of damaged and undamaged man-made 
structures is a fundamental task in image processing. Among 
these methods, mathematical morphology has already proved to 
be effective for many applications in remote sensing (Destival et 
al., 2009; Heijmans et al., 1998; Lefevre et al., 2007; Soille et 
al., 2002, Sun et al., 2008). Classification and feature extraction 
for remote sensing images from urban area based on 
morphological transformations and classification of hyper 
spectral data from urban areas based on extended morphological 
profiles were presented by Benediktsson et al (Benediktsson, 
2003). Similarly, Aaron K. Shackelford et al was investigated a 
method for automated 2-D building footprint extraction from 
high-Resolution satellite multispectral imagery (Shackelford, 
2004). There are different kinds of hazard area detection 
algorithms that have been developed by researches using remote 
sensing applications. However, for most of the above studies, 
disaster identifications methods still need more improvements. 
2. OBJECTIVES AND METHODOLOGY 
2.1 Objectives 
The objective of this study is to develop techniques for tsunami 
damaged building extraction, based on airborne platform based 
images acquired before and after the 2011 East coastline of 
Japan among Tohoku area and to carry out a damage assessment 
of building and vulnerable area mapping. The produce of 
damage maps are helpful for assist the short and long term 
reconstructions. Morphological operation of opening, closing 
with reconstruction, binarization and hit-or-miss transform were 
applied for image segmentation and building extraction. 
2.0 Mathematical Morphology Operators 
Here the Mathematical Morphology (MM) operators were 
developed by feature detectors attempts to identify buildings, 
shadows, roads and other urban features mainly for grey colour 
images. These vectored profiles were created using 
morphological opening and closing by reconstruction with 
different structure elements (SE).