Classification of earthquake-induced building damage using innovative methods

In the event of an earthquake, damaged and destroyed buildings are of central importance. Using a combination of automatic approaches and human crowdsourced visual interpretation based on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) derived data for the classification of earthquake damage offers a fast and objective assessment of the damage situation. Earthquake engineering knowledge is transferred to these innovative methods by developing and implementing a damage catalogue. This damage catalogue includes typical damage patterns for five damage grades ranging from crack widths to failure modes and focuses on the two common building materials - reinforced concrete and masonry. This paper presents the structure of such damage catalogue, defines crack widths and gives examples for particular damage grades. Moreover, the application of the damage catalogue in automatic and crowdsourcing approaches for a classification into five damage grades is explained.