The 2011 Tohoku Tsunami from the Sky: A Review on the Evolution of Artificial Intelligence Methods for Damage Assessment

Abstract

The Tohoku tsunami was a devastating event that struck North-East Japan in 2011 and remained in the memory of people worldwide. The amount of devastation was so great that it took years to achieve a proper assessment of the economical and structural damage, with the consequences still being felt today. However, this tsunami was also one of the first observed from the sky by modern satellites and aircrafts, thus providing a unique opportunity to exploit these data and train artificial intelligence methods that could help to better handle the aftermath of similar disasters in the future. This paper provides a review of how artificial intelligence methods applied to case studies about the Tohoku tsunami have evolved since 2011. We focus on more than 15 studies that are compared and evaluated in terms of the data they require, the methods used, their degree of automation, their metric performances, and their strengths and weaknesses.