Evaluation of effectiveness of three fuzzy systems and three texture extraction methods for building damage detection from post-event LiDAR data

Building damage maps after disasters can help us to better manage the rescue operations. Researchers have used Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data for extracting the building damage maps. For producing building damage maps from LiDAR data in a rapid manner, it is necessary to understand the effectiveness of features and classifiers. However, there is no comprehensive study on the performance of features and classifiers in identifying damaged areas. In this study, the effectiveness of three texture extraction methods and three fuzzy systems for producing the building damage maps was investigated. In the proposed method, at first, a pre-processing stage was utilized to apply essential processes on post-event LiDAR data. Second, textural features were extracted from the pre-processed LiDAR data. Third, fuzzy inference systems were generated to make a relation between the extracted textural features of buildings and their damage extents. The proposed method was tested across three areas over the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Three building damage maps with overall accuracies of 75.0%, 78.1% and 61.4% were achieved. Based on outcomes, the fuzzy inference systems were stronger than random forest, bagging, boosting and support vector machine classifiers for detecting damaged buildings.