AUTOMATIC ROAD DAMAGE DETECTION USING HIGH-RESOLUTION SATELLITE

IMAGE S AND ROAD MAPS

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1 National Earthquake Infrastructure Service, Beij ing, 1 00 3 6 , China

2 Institute of Remote Sensing and GIS , Peking University, Beij ing, 1 00 8 7 1 , China

3 School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2052,

Australia

Corresponding Author: Haij ian Ma Tel : 86-0 1 0- 8 8 0 1 5 7 5 6 , E-mail: ponyjian828@ 1 63 . com

ABSTRACT is that the geological condition and environment in

Roads are traffic lifelines for emergency rescue and disaster
relief. After major earthquakes, it is very significant to
extract road damage rapidly and accurately in disaster areas
by remote sensing for emergency rescue. Because road
damage caused by earthquake is ever-changing, there is no
common spectral characteristic of it in remote sensing
images. Meanwhile, there are many phenomena of
"synonyms spectrums" and "different spectrum
characteristics with the same object" in remote sensing
images. Thus, traditional methods by spectrum
characteristics are usually with low accuracy and not
universal. This paper proposes an automatic approach to
extract road damage rapidly based on sidelines using high
resolution satellites images and road maps. Road sideline is
one of stable geometric features in both pre-earthquake and
post-earthquake images, and the change of road sideline is a
remarkable evidence of road damage exists. The approach
firstly extracts sidelines of undamaged road from images
acquired after earthquakes, and then these road sidelines are
compared with the road lines before earthquakes supplied by
road maps. The damaged segments can be extracted through
comparison. The performance of the method is evaluated by
an experiment with QuickBird images in the WenChuan
earthquake disaster area.
Keywords-Road damage detection, High resolution,
Satellite images
1. INTRODUCTION
Road is one of important traffic lifelines for emergency
rescue and disaster relief. However, roads are usually
damaged by earthquakes and secondary disasters of
earthquakes [1]. There are two main reasons. The first
reason is roads extend in all directions. As a result, the
probability to be damaged is much higher. The other reason
neighborhood areas of roads are very complicate. As a result,
roads are prone to be damaged by some secondary disasters.
The result of road damage is not limited to direct economic
loss. Even more serious is traffic jams or disruptions caused
by road damage which will seriously hamper the efficiency
of the earthquake emergency rescue. For example, the
Wenchuan earthquake happened in China on May 12, 2008
has caused serious damage of roads which hinder rescue
workers and equipment into the disaster area. So after huge
earthquakes, it is very significant and necessary to extract
road damage rapidly in disaster areas by remote sensing for
emergency rescue.
Nowadays, remote sensing is widely used in disaster
monitoring and evaluating. There are several advantages.
The first is that remote sensing usually uses airplane or
satellite as platform which will not be affected by
earthquakes. The ground tools for acquiring disaster
information will be damaged during earthquakes. The
second is that remote sensing can quickly get disaster
information and continuous monitor the progress of disaster.
The third is that high spatial resolution remote sensing can
supply some very precise and detailed disaster information.
In high-resolution images, roads and ancillary facilities can
be clear and legible. This will lay the foundation for to
extract road damage caused by the earthquakes.
Currently, many methods have developed to extract road
damage [1-6] from remote sensing images. These methods
are divided into two classes. One kind of methods is change
detection based on multi-temporal images. These methods
extract disaster damage by using changes between pre­
earthquake and post-earthquake spectral characteristics in
the respective images [1]. Typical methods include
difference method, ratio method, correlation coefficient
method, principal component analysis, post-classification
method and so on. The other kind of methods is
classification based on post-earthquake single-temporal
images [1]. These methods extract disaster damage

978- 1-4799- 1 1 14- 1/ 13/$3 1 .00 ©20 13 IEEE 3718 IGARSS 2013
according to spectral characteristics of different damage 2.1. Image registration with road maps
situations. Main methods of this kind include maximum
likelihood classification, multi-feature discrimination and In order to get information from the combination of images
object-oriented classification, and so on. and road maps, image registration is a crucial step. After
However, there is no common spectral characteristic of it in registration, images will have the same geographic
remote sensing images because road damage caused by coordinate system with road maps. Road information
earthquake is ever-changing. Meanwhile, there are many extracted from images can be directly compared with road
phenomena of "synonyms spectrums" and "different maps. Then, a series of preprocessing filters including
spectrum characteristics with the same object" in remote smoothing and sharpening can be used to enhance image
sensing images. Thus, traditional methods by spectrum features for extracting roads.
characteristics are usually with low accuracy. Besides,
Post-disaster Images
traditional methods are not universal because some threshold
parameters must be adjusted for different images. For
manmade buildings in images, geometric characteristics are
the most significant, most likely to be perceived properties.
Road sideline is one of stable geometric features to describe
roads in remote sensing images, and changes of road Mask
sidelines in images are able to show physical changes of areas for
detecting
roads. This paper proposes an automatic approach to extract line
road damage rapidly using high resolution satellites images segments
and road maps, based on the change between pre-earthquake
and post-earthquake sidelines.
In section 2, the principle and workflow of automatic
approach to extract road damage are presented. Results of an
experiment are presented in section 3 . In section 4,
conclusions are discussed.
2. WORKFLOW OF EXTRACTION

In order to extract road damage from remote sensing images,

road features and their changes after earthquakes are
analyzed. Compare to characteristics before earthquake, Figure 1 . Block diagram of the approach.
spectral characteristics and geometric characteristics in
images are obviously different. The intensity or texture 2.2. Generating mask areas for detecting line segments
change is barely same or similar, as a result of the diversity
of earthquake damage. Fortunately, almost road damage will A road is simplified as piecewise line segments in our
cause fracture or deformation of road sidelines. These method, because extracting line segments is much easier
changes caused by earthquakes are concluded in Table 1 . than extracting curves from images. In order to extracting
line segments, post-disaster images are divided into different
Table 1 . Changes of road sidelines before and after mask areas. A mask area is a subarea in images which
earthquakes contains a road segment. The procedure of generating mask
Geometric Before After areas is operated by two steps. At first, a whole road is
Conti n u ity Conti n u o u s F ractu red divided into piecewise line segments according to local
Parallel
Two o r m o re p a ra l l e l Distorted roadsides a n d
curvature calculated by road maps. Then, for each line
Width
roadsides d is a p p e a red roadsides
segment, a buffer with a twice or triple road width is
generated as a mask area.
S a m e road , s i m i l a r width S a m e road , d iffe re nt width

In this paper, the principle of the approach presented

includes two main steps. The approach extracts undamaged 2.3. Extracting undamaged road segments
road segments from post-disaster images, and then compares
them with pre-disaster road map. If undamaged road In each mask area of a post-disaster image, an operator of
segments do not exist in post-disaster images, these extracting undamaged road line segments is used. The
segments are considered as damaged segments. The operator works following the steps below.
approach includes four following steps as shown in Figure 1 .
2.3.1. Edge detection and thinning

371 9
Edges in an image usually indicate the boundaries of objects, road lines from other lines. A method for detecting parallel
such as road sides. The aim of edge detection is to reduce road lines based on perceptual grouping is proposed.
the amount of image pixels for further processing and filter Parallelism of two segments, the length of each segment and
out less relevant information. An operator named Edge the distance of two segments are selected to compute
Detector with Embedded Confidence (EDEC) [7] is used to probability of grouping. The pair of line segments which
detect edges in remote sensing images. Because the width of have the biggest probability is selected as road lines. Figure
an edge detected from images is usually not one pixel size, 4 shows some results of grouping parallel lines in each mask
the morphological thinning operation is used to remove the area.
unwanted spurious points on the edge of an image. Figure
2(a) is an original image. The result of this step is shown in
Figure 2(b). As can be seen from the figure, pixels of road
sidelines are detected for further processing.
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(a) Candidate segments (b) Parallel segment pairs
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(a) Original image (b) Edge map by EDEC
Figure 2. Edge detection.
2.3.2.Detecting candidates of line segments using Hough
Transformation
Normally in each mask area, there is only a road segment
with two parallel line segments in an image. An improved
Hough Transformation technology [1] is developed to detect
candidates of line segments. Hough Transformation is a
classical method to detect lines from images. This method
has a good performance of noise reduction and can give
parameters of line segments. For an image acquired after
earthquake, the result of line detection in each mask area
2.4. Detecting damaged road segments
The result of extracting undamaged road segments is
compared with pre-disaster road lines from road maps to
detect damaged segments. If the segment exists in pre­
disaster data but not be extracted from post-disaster images,
the segment will be considered as a damaged segment. After
automatically detecting damaged segments , there will be
some wrong segments. A tool for remove wrong segments is
supplied through analyzing spectral and texture features in
images.
3. EXPERIMENTA L RESULTS

depends on the damage degree of a road segment. If both In order to test the approach presented above, an experiment
sides of a road segment are destroyed, no line segments will with a QuickBird image in WenChuan earthquake disaster
be extracted. If only one road side is destroyed, one line area is carried. The performance of the approach is
segment will be extracted. Figure 3 shows the result of this evaluated by the result of manual interpretation.
step in a mask area. The red lines in Figure 3(c) are line
segments extracted from the edge map in Figure 3(a).
) '•
3.1. Experimental data
I
I .

The study area is located in Wenchuan County where a huge

.d .
.
-
earthquake has happened on May 12, 2008. The earthquake
has seriously damaged a number of national and provincial
roads. A QuickBird image with 0.6 1m resolution acquired in
three days after the earthquake and a road map from national
fundamental geographic information database are used as
(a) Edge map (b) Hough parameter (c) Line segments
experiment data which are shown in Figure 5(a). Road
space
position, width and class are supplied by the road map.
Figure 3. Hough Transformation.
3.2. Experimental results and accuracy evaluation
2.3.3.
A software has developed to do this job. The experimental
Detecting parallel road lines
Because the image resolution is high, road sidelines, road
marking lines or other similar lines will be detected by the results are shown in Figure 5. Figure 5(b) shows the
above line detection operator. It is necessary to distinguish extraction result of undamaged road segments from the post-

3 720
earthquake image. Figure 5( c) shows the final result of
damaged road segments.
In order to evaluate the accuracy of our approach, a manual
result is interpretated as a reference data. Location and
length are respectively compared between the result of our
method and the reference data. In terms of location, both are
essentially coincident. Table 2 shows the accuracy result.
The of I is about 86%.
experiment result shown, the presented approach can rapidly
and accurately extract road damage from images acquired
after earthquakes. Our method has two advantages. The first
one is to extract road damage using geometric features rather
than spectral characteristics. This not only makes extraction
more reliable by overcoming the deficiencies of the spectral
characteristics, but also expands the versatility of the method.
In addition, road maps are used in this method not only to
supply pre-earthquake road information but also to help
extracting road segments from post-earthquake images. The
knowledge supplied from road maps effectively reduces
human intervention in the extraction process, and improve
the algorithm's degree of automation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The research activities described in the paper were funded

by the Seismic Science and Technology Spark Program (No.
XH1036) sponsored by China Earthquake Administration
(CEA). Also, thank China Scholarship Council (CSC) for
supporting our research.
5. REFERENCES

[ I ] HJ Ma. "Research on Road Damage Detection from High

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[3] M . Chini, N . Pierdicca and W.J. Emery. "Exploiting SAR and

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[4] N. C. Rowe and L. L. Grewe. "Change detection for linear

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4. CONCLUSIONS
vo1.28, pp. 1 3 - 1 4, 2007.
This paper presented an automatic method for extracting
rapidly damaged roads caused by earthquakes using high
[7] P. Meer, B. Georgescu. "Edge Detection with Embedded
Confidence". iEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
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performance has been tested by an experiment with a
QuickBird image in WenChuan earthquake. As the

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