THE CHALLEGE

The conditions after a crisis event can be extremely chaotic and difficult to handle for both, the  population hit by the event as well as the first responders. In particular, the amount of inflicted damage on critical infrastructure, such as buildings, roads or bridges is often difficult to assess due to the lack of reliable information from the crisis area. In combination with a breakdown of general state of order, this can hamper the effectiveness and efforts of disaster responders tremendously when attempting to get the conditions back to normal.

THE PROJECT

In order to improve the situation for crisis managers and responders the project aims to develop a crises response system that provides more accurate crisis mapping and situation assessment. The aim is to integrate several key expertise of the involved Austrian and Taiwanese consortium partners through dedicated technological developments and demonstration activities within Earth observation (satellites), information systems and crowdsourcing technologies, thereby providing a technology leap for the involved partners thereby contributing to the European and global technological and crisis responder advancements, now especially necessary in this era of climate change.

Specifically, QuinJunSAT (QuinJun, 群眾, is the pronunciation of the word “crowd” in traditional Chinese) improves the capacity of crisis managers before, during and after disaster events through an innovative approach, in which satellite and crowdsourced information from volunteers are automatically integrated to obtain quick response and accurate assessment information of damages.

Considering an earthquake, key information on damaged infrastructure is extracted from very high-resolution satellite imagery in an automatic way, while the ground-truth data provided by volunteers on site using a smartphone application confirm or reject the detected damages, as well as provide additional data of potential relevance and value to crisis managers. By combining Earth observation data with information obtained from crowdsourcing, the project aims at improving the existing situational awareness picture by drastically increasing the detection and identification accuracy of damaged infrastructure, which leads to:

• smarter resource allocation and response actions
• shorter reaction times and
• lower total cost for relief actions

Project Coordinator

GeoVille Information Systems GmbH

Project partners

AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH (Austria)

GeoThings Inc. (Taiwan)