Identificazione di aree inondate da immagini SAR a media ed alta risoluzione

The objective of this study has been the assessment of automatic techniques for the generation of flooded areas maps from SAR images. To achieve this goal, we considered high spatial resolution (1 to 4 meters) X-band SAR data acquired by the Italian COSMO-SkyMed constellation. The case studies are the Massaciuccoli Lake (Tuscany) flood in December 2009, and the Tanaro River flood event occurred in the last days of April 2009. The change detection approach adopted is based on a technique for the automatic thresholding of the image intensity. Moreover, for the Tanaro test-site, where interferometric pairs with sufficient correlation were available, it has been verified an ap-proach based on the segmentation of the interferometric coherence image. Experimental results con-firm the effectiveness of using high resolution SAR data in the context of emergency situations where it is required the precise identification of afflicted areas for damage assessment and emer-gency action plan.