Unsupervised detection of building destruction during war from publicly available radar satellite imagery.

ABSTRACT: Automated detection of building destruction in conflict zones is crucial for human rights monitoring, humanitarian response, and academic research. However, existing approaches (i) rely on proprietary satellite imagery, both expensive and of limited availability at wartime, (ii) require labeled training data, usually not available in war-affected regions, or (iii) use optical imagery, regularly obstructed by cloud cover. This study addresses these challenges by introducing an unsupervised method to detect destruction at the building level using freely and globally available Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar images from the European Space Agency. By statistically assessing interferometric coherence changes over time, unlike existing approaches, our method enables the detection of destruct

SUBMITTER: Racek D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12687346 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature