Development of an Outline Detection Tool (ODT) in QGIS environment for risk mitigation applications

Abstract

Vision techniques are presently developed, within a GIS environment, to detect any type of structural and infrastructure damage caused by natural catastrophic events. The aim of this paper is to report on the implementation of a software tool which is able to identify the border of any system that could be damaged by a negative event. The potential of an open source tool named “Magic Wand” is investigated in order to create an innovative procedure which allows to quickly select buildings and artefacts in disaster areas. The pixels of satellite images are the input that the tool requires. Some examples are presented in order to provide the main features of the proposed function.