In the early stages of post-disaster response, a quick and reliable damage assessment map is essential. As time is a critical factor, automated damage mapping from remotely sensed images is the expected solution to drastically reduce data acquisition and computation time. Recently, high-resolution satellite images, such as QuickBird data, have been in high demand by damage assessment analysts and disaster management practitioners. However, the existing automated mapping approaches hardly accommodate such high-resolution data. This research aims at developing a new context-based automated approach for earthquake damage mapping from high-resolution satellite images. Relevant contextual information (including structure, shape, size, edge texture, spatial relations) describing the damage situation is formulated and up-scaled on a morphological scale-space. Speed optimization is achieved by parallel processing implementation. The developed approach was tested with two QuickBird images acquired on 26 June 2005 and 3 June 2008 over YingXiu town, Sichuan, China, which suffered the devastating 12 May 2008 earthquake. In comparison to the reference, the developed mapping approach could achieve over 80% accuracy for computation of the damage ratio. Future research is planned to test the approach on various disaster cases for both optical and radar images using a grid-computing platform towards a cost-effective damage mapping solution.

Ecosystem functioning is dependent a lot on large mammals, which are, however, vulnerable and facing extinction risks due to human impacts mainly. Megafauna of Asia has been declining for a long, not only in numbers but also in their distribution ranges. In the current study, we collected information on past and current occurrence and distribution records of Asia’s megafauna species. We reconstructed the historical distribution ranges of the six herbivores and four carnivores for comparison with their present ranges, to quantify spatially explicit levels of mega-defaunation. Results revealed that historically the selected megafauna species were more widely distributed than at current. Severe range contraction was observed for the Asiatic lion, three rhino species, Asian elephant, tigers, and tapirs. Defaunation maps generated have revealed the vanishing of megafauna from parts of the East, Southeast, and Southwest Asia, even some protected Areas losing up to eight out of ten megafaunal species. These defaunation maps can help develop future conservation policies, to save the remaining distribution ranges of large mammals.

A new method has been developed to automatically extract moving vehicles and subsequently determine their speeds from a pair of QuickBird (QB) panchromatic (PAN) and multispectral (MS) images. Since the PAN and MS sensors of QB have a slight time lag (approximately 0.2 s), the speed of a moving vehicle can be determined from the difference in the positions of the vehicle observed in the PAN and MS images due to the time lag. An object-based approach can be used to extract a vehicle from the PAN image, which has a resolution of 0.6 m. However, it is difficult to accurately extract the position of a vehicle from an MS image because its resolution is 2.4 m. Thus, an area correlation method is proposed to determine the location of a vehicle from an MS image at a sub-pixel level. The speed of the moving vehicle can then be calculated by using the vehicle extraction results. This approach was tested on several parts of a QB image covering central Tokyo, Japan, and the accuracy of the results is demonstrated in this study.

This letter introduces a new approach for light detection and ranging (LiDAR) waveform decomposition. First, inflection points are identified by the Ramer-Douglas-Peucker curve-fitting algorithm, and each inflection point has a corresponding baseline during curve fitting. Second, according to the spatial relation between the baseline and the inflection point, peaks are selected from the inflection points. The distance between each peak and its baseline and the maximum number of peaks are employed as a criterion to select a “significant” peak. Initial parameters such as width and boundaries of peaks provide restraints for the decomposition; right and left boundaries are estimated via a conditional search. Each peak is fitted by a Gaussian function separately, and other parts of the waveform are fitted as line segments. Experiments are implemented on waveforms acquired by both small-footprint LiDAR system LMS-Q560 and large-footprint LiDAR system Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor. The results indicate that the algorithm could provide an optimal solution for LiDAR waveform decomposition.