Detection of Damaged Rooftop Areas From High-Resolution Aerial Images Based on Visual Bag-of-Words Model

The classification of damaged building types has received increasing attention in recent years. The detection of damaged rooftop areas is crucial to improve the accuracy of classification of building damaged types. In this letter, an approach for the automatic detection of damaged rooftops areas based on the visual bag-of-words (BoWs) model is presented. First, the building rooftop is segmented into different superpixel areas. Then, the visual BoWs model is employed to build semantic feature vectors for damaged or nondamaged parts of each superpixel area. Finally, damaged and nondamaged parts of rooftop superpixel areas are discriminated using support vector machine. An evaluation of experimental results, for a selected study site of the Beichuan earthquake ruins, Sichuan, China, shows that this method is feasible and effective for the detection of damaged rooftop areas.