What happened to the potential of video data for post-disaster damage assessment?

Natural and man-made disasters create a need for comprehensive and reliable information on the nature, extent, and consequences of an event. Particularly stringent information collection constraints are present following unexpected disasters, such as earthquakes or industrial accidents. In those situations only partial, inaccurate or conflicting ground-based information is typically available, creating a well-recognised potential for satellite remote sensing (RS) to fill the gap. However, currently operational space-based sensors may not be able to provide timely data due to orbital constraints. In addition, even high spatial resolution satellites (< 1m) are limited in their capacity to reveal true 3D structural damage at a level of detail necessary for appropriate disaster response. The first data type likely to be available after any given disaster in an urban setting is oblique airborne HDTV or video imagery. We provide a review of video/TV-based studies that were or, with appropriate adaptation, could be used during post-disaster response. After initially promising studies carried out after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, progress appears to have slowed down. We have returned to airborne video data and their use for systematic, quantitative, and near-real time damage assessment, as well as the possibilities of integrating pre-event GIS and other auxiliary data. We focused on texture-based damage mapping as well as the potential of the available imagery for 3D reconstruction of the disaster area.
Video data were used for a partial 3D reconstruction of the site of a fireworks factory explosion in Enschede, the Netherlands, in 2000, which destroyed nearly 500 buildings. Texture-based segmentation was implemented on video data of the 1999 Kocaeli (Turkey) earthquake.