Building Damage Detection Using Deep Learning Architecture with Satellite Images: The Case of the 6 February 2023 Kahramanmaraş Earthquake

Turkey is located in a region with a high density of fault lines, which makes it susceptible to a significant earthquake risk. The Kahramanmaraş earthquake on February 6, 2023, was one of the most devastating in recent years, causing extensive damage and loss. This study aims to support post-disaster rapid response and rescue operations by using deep learning techniques to detect and classify damaged and intact buildings from satellite images. Satellite images of the Kahramanmaraş and Antakya regions, with a resolution of 8192x4537, were obtained via Google Earth Pro. The images were labeled as damaged or undamaged using the Labelme editor, which generated JSON format files for the labeled images. Using Google Colab, the JSON files and unlabeled images were merged, and buildings were cropped and categorized into two classes: damaged and undamaged. As a preprocessing step, interpolation was applied, resulting in 2211 images with a size of 128x128. A Convolutional Neural Network [2] algorithm was created using TensorFlow, a Python library, via Google Colab. The performance metrics, including accuracy, loss, F1 score, ROC curve, precision, recall, and confusion matrix values, were compared based on the experiments.