Abstract

Geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) are very useful and
effective tools in disaster management. Various natural hazards like earthquakes, landslides,
floods, fires, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and cyclones are natural hazards that kill lots of people
and destroy property and infrastructures every year. Remotely sensed data can be used very
efficiently to assess severity and impact of damage due to these disasters. In the disaster relief
phase, GIS, grouped with global positioning system (GPS) is extremely useful in search and
rescue operations in areas that have been devastated. Disaster mapping is the drawing of areas
that have been through excessive natural or man-made troubles to the normal environment where
there is a loss of life, property and national infrastructures. During the disaster prevention stage,
GIS is used in managing the huge levels of data required for vulnerability and hazard assessment.
In the disaster preparedness stage, it is a tool for planning evacuation routes, designing centers
for emergency operations, and for the integration of satellite data with other relevant data in the
design of disaster warning systems. In the disaster rehabilitation stage, GIS is used to organize
the damage information and post-disaster census information and in the evaluation of sites for
reconstruction.
We focus on the following topics in our research work:
 Disaster management
 Disaster mapping
 rescue planning
The application areas under focus are flood detection, Earthquake effected area detection,
landslide area detection, forest fire, avalanche, cloud based weather estimation and precaution
measures, disaster area mapping and rescue route organization.

The resolution of remote sensing images increases every day, raising the level of detail and the
heterogeneity of the scenes. Most of the existing geographic information systems classification
tools have used the same methods for years. With these new high resolution images basic
classification methods do not provide satisfactory results.

In this study we develop a region-based classification method, consisting in two steps: a

segmentation and a classification. The segmentation techniques like Energy filters, Gabor filters,
Wavelets, Markov model etc divide the image into several homogenous regions. The
classification techniques like Random test, Support vector machine, Hidden Markov models etc
have proven to be better than the existing counterpart algorithms.
Introduction

Satellite images are rich and plays a vital role in providing geographical information [1].
Satellite and remote sensing images provides quantitative and qualitative information that
reduces complexity of field work and study time [2]. One of the major goal of image processing
is to retrieve required information from the given image in a way that it will not effects the other
features of that image. De-noising/enhancement of an image is the most important step required
to fulfill this requirement [1]-[2]. After removing noise from an image, you can perform any
operation on that image [3]. Satellite remote sensing technologies collects data/images at regular
intervals. The volumes of data receive at datacenters is huge and it is growing exponentially as
the technology is growing at rapid speed as timely and data volumes have been growing at an
exponential rate [3]. There is a strong need of effective and efficient mechanisms to extract and
interpret valuable information from massive satellite images. Classification of the objects is an
easy task, but it's challenging to the machine. The image classification includes image pre-
processing, image sensors, object detection, object segmentation, feature extraction and object
classification.

The Image Classification system consists of a database that contains predefined patterns
that compare with an object to classify to appropriate category. Image Classification is an
important task in various fields such as remote sensing, biometry, biomedical images, and robot
navigation. Satellite image classification is a powerful technique to extract information from
huge number of satellite images. Satellite image classification is a process of grouping pixels
into meaningful classes [4]. It is a multi-step workflow. Satellite image classification can also be
referred as extracting information from satellite images. Satellite image classification is not
complex, but the analyst has to take many decisions and choices in satellite image classification
process. Satellite image classification involves in interpretation of remote sensing images, spatial
data mining, studying various vegetation types such as agriculture and foresters etc. and studying
urban and to determine various land uses in an area [5].

Image Segmentation is one of the main steps of image processing, in which any image is
being subdivided into multiple segments. Each segment will represent some kind of information
to user in the form of color, intensity, or texture. Hence, it is important to isolate the boundaries
of any image in the form of its segments [4]. This process of segmentation will assign a single
value to each pixel of an image in order to make it easy to differentiate between different regions
of any image. This differentiation between different segments of image is done on the basis of
three properties of image, i.e., color, intensity, and texture of that image. Therefore the selection
of any image segmentation technique is done after observing the problem domain [5].

The importance of Image segmentation can’t be neglected because it is used in almost

every field of science, i.e., removing noise from an image, medical images [6]-[10], satellite
imaging, machine vision, computer vision, biometrics, military, Image Retrieval [11]-[12],
extracting features and recognizing objects from the given image. [13]-[15]. In this paper, a
region-based classification method of two steps: a segmentation and a classification has been
developed and studied . The segmentation techniques like Energy filters, Gabor filters, Wavelets,
Markov model etc divide the image into several homogenous regions. The classification
techniques like Random test, Support vector machine, Hidden Markov models etc have proven to
be better than the existing counterpart algorithms.
ProblemDefinition

In the existing classification methods

is not sensitive to covariation and variations in the spectral signature to objects.
The algorithm may mistakenly separate pixels with slightly different spectral val-
ues and assign them to a unique cluster when they, in fact, represent a spectral
continum of a group of similar objects.