On the Use of Airborne Imaging Spectroscopy Data for the Automatic Detection and Delineation of Surface Water Bodies

There is economical and ecological relevance for remote sensing applications of inland and coastal waters: The European Union Water Framework Directive (European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, 2000) for inland and coastal waters requires the EU member states to take actions in order to reach a good ecological status in inland and coastal waters by 2015. This involves characterization of the specific trophic state and the implementation of monitoring systems to verify the ecological status. Financial resources at the national and local level are insufficient to assess the water quality using conventional methods of regularly field and laboratory work only. While remote sensing cannot replace the assessment of all aquatic parameters in the field, it powerfully complements existing sampling programs and offers the base to extrapolate the sampled parameter information in time and in space. The delineation of surface water bodies is a prerequisite for any further remote sensing based analysis and even can by itself provide up-to-date information for water resource management, monitoring and modelling (Manavalan et al., 1993). It is further important in the monitoring of seasonally changing water reservoirs (e.g., Alesheikh et al., 2007) and of shortterm events like floods (Overton, 2005). Usually the detection and delineation of surface water bodies in optical remote sensing data is described as being an easy task. Since water absorbs most of the irradiation in the near-infrared (NIR) part of the electromagnetic spectrum water bodies appear very dark in NIR spectral bands and can be mapped by simply applying a maximum threshold on one of these bands (Swain & Davis, 1978: section 5-4). Many studies took advantage of this spectral behaviour of water and applied methods like single band density slicing (e.g., Work & Gilmer, 1976), spectral indices (McFeeters, 1996, Xu, 2006) or multispectral supervised classification (e.g., Frazier & Page, 2000, Lira, 2006). However, all of these methods have the drawback that they are not fully automated since the analyst has to select a scene-specific threshold (Ji et al., 2009) or training pixels. Moreover there are certain situations where these methods lead to misclassification. For instance, water constituents in turbid water as well as water bottom reflectance and sun glint can raise the reflectance spectrum of surface water even in the NIR spectral range up to a reflectance level which is typical for dark surfaces on land such as dark rocks (e.g., basalt, lava), bituminous roofing materials and in particular shadow regions. Consequently, Carleer & Wolff (2006) amongst others found the land cover classes water and shadow to be highly confused in image classifications. This problem especially occurs in environments where both, a high amount of shadow and water regions can exist, such as urban landscapes, mountainous landscapes or cliffy coasts as well as generally in images with water bodies and cloud shadows. In this investigation we focus on the development of a new surface water body detection algorithm that can be automatically applied without user knowledge and supplementary data on any hyperspectral image of the visible and near-infrared (VNIR) spectral range. The analysis is strictly focused on the VNIR part of the electromagnetic spectrum due to the growing number of VNIR imaging spectrometers. The developed approach consists of two main steps, the selection of potential water pixels (section 4.1) and the removal of false positives from this mask (sections 4.2 and 4.3). In this context the separation between water bodies and shadowed surfaces is the most challenging task which is implemented by consecutive spectral and spatial processing steps (sections 4.3.1 and 4.3.2) resulting in very high detection accuracies

A Study on Influential Factors on Building Damage in Kesennuma, Japan from the 2011 Great East Japan Tsunami

A number of buildings were damaged by the 2011 Great East Japan tsunami in the Tohoku area. The research objective is to determine the significant predictor variables of the level of building damage. This paper used detailed data on damaged buildings in Kesennuma City, Japan, collected by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT). The tested explanatory parameters included the inundation depth, number of floors, volume of the building, debris flow, structural material, and function of the building. Through multinomial logistic regression, the results found that the number of floors was significantly associated with the damage level; the inundation depth, structural material (reinforced concrete and masonry), and function of the building (commercial facility, transportation/storage facility, and public facility) were partially associated with the damage level. This study can contribute to academic research by assessing the contribution of different variables to observed damage data by applying statistical analysis, as well as the practical contribution of providing an examination of the predominant factors driving tsunami damage to buildings