Earthquake detection by new motion estimation algorithm in video processing

As increasing urbanization is taking place worldwide, earthquake hazards pose serious threats to lives and properties for urban areas. A practical earthquake prediction method appears to be far from realization. Generally, the traditional instruments for earthquake detection have the disadvantages of high cost and size. To solve these problems, this paper presents a new method which can detect earthquake intensity using video capture device. The main method is based on a new proposed motion vector algorithm with simple but effective methods to immediately calculate acceleration of a predefined target object. By estimating the motion vector variation, the movement distance of predefined target object can be computed, and therefore the earthquake amplitude can be defined. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated in a series of experimental simulations. It is shown that the scheme successfully detects the earthquake occurrence and identifies the earthquake amplitude from video streams.