Tsunami Affected Farmland Extraction Using Morphological Profiles (MPs) Method by Satellite Images Including SAR and Visible Near-Infrared Band Data

Abstract. The agricultural fields along the coast were submerged under the sea water after the 2011 off the Pacific Coast of Tohoku Japan Tsunami. The conventional method of detecting Tsunami reached area by SAR satellite data is to compare the data obtained between previous to and after the Tsunami. However such kind of SAR data should be prepared prior to the natural disaster, but in many disaster cases, people have often encountered difficulties in finding such kind of data observed in advance in some regions. Therefore it is desirable to find a way to detect the flood suffering farmlands caused by a Tsunami, using only data observed after the disaster event. The morphological profiles (MPs) method are tested using ALOS/PALSAR and AVNIR-2 data. This MPs method is proposed as the tool for extracting information about the size, shape and the orientation of structures in single-band remote sensing images and has been improved to establish the extended morphological profiles(EMP) dealing with full-spectral information in the multi-/hyper-spectral data (Benediktsson, J.A. et al.,2003,2005). The author’s work is intended to apply this MPs method to combined single polarization SAR data and visual and near-infrared bands data. The results approximately coincide with the farmland regions actually reached by the Tsunami. This MPs method requires only data once obtained soon after a disaster, light computer resources and very short turnaround time. It should be suitable for the detection of Tsunami reached areas or tidal wave reached areas, caused by a Typhoon for example, using satellite data only once obtained after a disaster.