Hierarchical multi-sensor approach for the assessment of flood related damages

Flood-related disasters have been most serious and frequent in Korea, causing substantial suffering, severe loss of life, and economic damage. It is important to determine quickly the extent of flooding and estimate the damages during extreme cases. Even though Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), an active sensor, is highly applicable to flood monitoring owing to its sensitivity to the water area, detail information about damages is not easily extractable. Additional information such as from high resolution optic senor can be utilized to get detailed information needed to estimate the cost of flood damages. For this we utilized a spatial hierarchical approach to quickly estimate the flood related damages. SAR imagery, Unmanned Airborne Vehicle (UAV) imagery, and terrestrial photogrammetric method are used to estimate the flood related damages. We not only checked the accuracy of each sensor in a different occasion but also checked multi-sensor over a same site. As a result, overall accuracy is within the permitted accuracy for the flood analysis. The hierarchical scheme of utilizing the satellite imagery, UAV imagery, and ground-based observation suggested in this study for the estimation of flood-related damage can be the solution for the flood-related estimation of the damages. And this approach could save a lot of governmental money for recovering the damage due to its relatively very high accuracy compared to the current manual approach.