Abstract:In this research, a semi-automated building damage detection system is addressed under the umbrella of high-spatial resolution remotely sensed images. The aim of this study was to develop a semi-automated fuzzy decision making system using Genetic Algorithm (GA). Our proposed system contains four main stages. In the first stage, post-event optical images were pre-processed. In the second stage, textural features were extracted from the pre-processed post-event optical images using Haralick texture extraction method. Afterwards, in the third stage, a semi-automated Fuzzy-GA (Fuzzy Genetic Algorithm) decision making system was used to identify damaged buildings from the extracted texture features. In the fourth stage, a comprehensive sensitivity analysis was performed to achieve parameters of GA leading to more accurate results. Finally, the accuracy of results was assessed using check and test samples. The proposed system was tested over the 2010 Haiti earthquake (Area 1 and Area 2) and the 2003 Bam earthquake (Area 3). The proposed system resulted in overall accuracies of 76.88 ± 1.22%, 65.43 ± 0.29%, and 90.96 ± 0.15% over Area 1, Area 2, and Area 3, respectively. On the one hand, based on the concept of the proposed Fuzzy-GA decision making system, the automation level of this system is higher than other existing systems. On the other hand, based on the accuracy of our proposed system and four advanced machine learning techniques, i.e., bagging, boosting, random forests, and support vector machine, in the detection of damaged buildings, it seems that our proposed system is robust and efficient.
Lake Urmia is one of the largest saline lakes in the world, and has a great effect on its surrounding ecosystems as well as the economic, social, and even cultural condition of its basin inhabitants. Hence, continuous monitoring of lake area changes is necessary and unavoidable for better land management and prevention of its degradation. In this study, by using Landsat 8 images and by preforming some essential pre-processing tasks, the area of the lake was estimated using the number of traditional spectral indices and a new one and the automatic Otsu's thresholding method for 5 years (2013–2017). The results showed that this index shows more accurate results than other indices when estimating the area of the lake and can separate water class from land one with an average overall accuracy of 96%.
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