Unsupervised Detection of Earthquake-Triggered Roof-Holes From UAV Images Using Joint Color and Shape Features

Many methods have been developed to detect damaged buildings due to earthquake. However, little attention has been paid to analyze slightly affected buildings. In this letter, an unsupervised method is presented to detect earthquake-triggered “roof-holes” on rural houses from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images. First, both orthomosaic and gradient images are generated from a set of UAV images. Then, a modified Chinese restaurant franchise model is used to learn an unsupervised model of the geo-object classes in the area by fusing both oversegmented orthomosaic and gradient images. Finally, “roof-holes” on rural houses are detected using the learned model. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of both qualitative and quantitative indexes.