Intercomparison and validation of building damage assessments based on post-Haiti 2010 earthquake imagery using multi-source reference data

The Haiti 2010 earthquake is one of the first major disasters in which very high resolution satellite and airborne imagery was embraced to delineate the event impact. Several rapid mapping initiatives exploited post-earthquake satellite and airborne imagery to produce independent point feature sets marking the damage grade of affected buildings. Despite the obvious potential of the satellite remote sensing technology in providing damage figures, the scale and complexity of the urban structures in Port-au-Prince cause overall figures and patterns of the damage assessments to yield a rather poor representation of the true damage extent. The higher detail airborne imagery performs much better as confirmed by different validation studies carried out in the last two years. In this paper, in addition to the review and analysis of the different validation works, we investigate the quality of damage assessment derived by different activities through a simple intercomparison and a validation using a complete building ground survey. The results show that the identification of building damage from aerial imagery provides a realistic estimate of the spatial pattern and intensity of building damage.