Objectives The Mw 7.8 earthquake occurred in Turkey on February 6th, 2023, which is a rare powerful earthquake in recent years. Building collapse detection is an important part of post-earthquake damage assessment and emergency rescue. Facing the emergency rescue and post-earthquake disaster assessment, this paper aims to comprehensively utilize the intelligent interpretation technology of satellite remote sensing, coupled with high-resolution optical daily and night-time light remote sensing images, and to efficiently assess the collapsed buildings in the extreme disaster areas with low time and labor costs.

Methods In this paper, we present a multi-level rapid localization scheme for disaster-affected regions. First, the proposed approach involves the utilization of low- and medium-resolution night-time light data to estimate the extent of extreme disaster areas. Subsequently, high-resolution optical remote sensing imagery is employed to extract the collapsed buildings. By training a semi-supervised deep learning network with a small number of manually collected samples, the scheme automatically identifies collapse areas, thereby facilitating the precise localization of collapsed buildings. A high-resolution architecture network, HRNet, is employed in this study. HRNet has the advantages in both sematic and spatial feature representation, and can capture the collapsed buildings with muti-scale characteristics.

Results Six cities along the border between the Arab Plate and the Eurasian Plate are severely affected, from Adelman to Kahraman Marrash, and then to Antakia. A total of 2 377 collapsed buildings are detected in the extreme disaster areas. Except for Nurdaji and Antakia cities, where the proportion of collapsed buildings exceeded 2%, the proportion of collapsed buildings in the other four cities is close to 1%. After manual verification, the recall rate of the intelligent interpretation plan is between 74% and 93%.

Conclusions The efficiency and effectiveness of this approach are demonstrated through its application in assessing the building collapse situation after the Mw 7.8 earthquake in Turkey. The proposed work can serve as a timely reference for macro decision-making in post-earthquake emergency rescue operations.