ANNALS OF GEOPHYSICS, 59, Fast Track 5, 2016; DOI: 10.4401/ag-7185 1 A multisensor approach for the 2016 Amatrice earthquake damage as- sessment VITO ROMANIELLO* 1 , ALESSANDRO PISCINI 1 , CHRISTIAN BIGNAMI 1 , ROBERTA ANNIBALLE 2 , AND SALVATORE STRAMONDO 1 1 Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia 2 DIET, Sapienza University of Rome * vito.romaniello@ingv.it Abstract This work proposes methodologies aimed at evaluating the damage occurred in the Amatrice town by us- ing optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) change features obtained from satellite images. The ob- jective is to achieve a damage map employing the satellite change features in a classifier algorithm, namely the Features Stepwise Thresholding (FST) method. The main novelties of the proposed analysis concern the estimation of derived features at object scale and the exploitation of the unsupervised FST algorithm. A segmentation of the study area into several buildings blocks has been done by considering a set of poly- gons, over the Amatrice town, extracted from the open source Open Street Map (OSM) geo-database. The available satellite dataset is composed of several optical and SAR images, collected before and after the seismic event. Regarding the optical data, we selected the Normalised Difference Index (NDI), and two quantities com- ing from the Information Theory, namely the Kullback-Libler Divergence (KLD) and the Mutual Infor- mation (MI). In addition, for the SAR data we picked out the Intensity Correlation Difference (ICD) and the KLD parameter. The exploitation of these features in the FST algorithm permits to obtain a plausible damage map that is able to indicate the most affected areas. I. INTRODUCTION n earthquake damage map, available right after a seismic event (from few hours up to few days, depending on the satellite data availability), can guide the rescue teams interventions towards the most affected areas. Satellite data can be very useful for this purpose, thanks to the wide coverage and the high spatial resolution, especially to map dam- age in large regions, where villages cannot eas- ily accessed. Satellite damage assessment is based on detection techniques that are capable to identify changes of an object by observing it at different times (Ingram (1981); Jenson (1983)). Both optical and radar sensors can be exploited for change detection purposes and several examples are reported in the literature A