Road Damage Detection From Post-Disaster High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images Based on TLD Framework

Road is one of important traffic lifelines that could be damaged after disaster by landslide rubble, buildings debris, and collapsed branches of trees. Therefore, road damage detection and assessment using post-Disaster High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images is extremely important for finding optimal paths and conducting rescue missions. In an emergency context, the existing methods based on change detection for road damage detection are difficult to achieve due to the mismatch of different data sources, especially for rural areas where the pre-disaster remote sensing imagery are hard to obtain. In this paper, a novel method based on the Tracking, Learning, and Detector (TLD) framework for detecting the damaged road region from post-disaster high-resolution remote sensing image is presented. First, a spoke wheel operator is employed to define the initial template of road. Then, the TLD framework is used to identify the suspected road damaged areas. Finally, the damaged road areas are extracted by pruning the false damaged roads. The proposed method was evaluated using post-disaster high-resolution remote sensing images collected over Beichuan, China in 2008 and Lushan, China in 2013. The results show that the proposed method is feasible and effective for road damage detection and assessment. Our main conclusion is that such an approach qualifies for practical use.