Video-based Direct Time Series Measurement of Along-Strike Slip on the Coseismic Surface Rupture During the 2025 Mw7.7 Myanmar Earthquake

Abstract

This study presents a time-resolved analysis of coseismic lateral surface rupture along the Sagaing Fault during the Mw 7.7 Mandalay, Myanmar earthquake on March 28, 2025. Leveraging a publicly available Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) footage alongside on-site measurements, we show the first in-situ high sampling rate direct measurement of a coseismic slip evolution of a fault during an earthquake. Our work comprises four primary stages: data acquisition, video pre-processing, object tracking, and physical displacement estimation. Video pre-processing includes camera stabilization and distortion correction. We then track pixel-level movements of selected reference points using two complementary computer-vision approaches -- a traditional grayscale template matching algorithm and a state-of-the-art vision transformer multi-object tracking algorithm, and verify both profiles against meticulous manual frame-by-frame measurements, with results that closely match one another. Finally, we translated those pixel displacements into real-world ground movements by calibrating against reference objects whose dimensions were measured on site. Based on the resulting displacement time series, we estimated the critical slip-weakening distance. The resulting high-resolution time series of the along-strike slip, provided in the appendix, offers a critical benchmark for validating dynamic rupture simulations, refining frictional models, and enhancing seismic hazard assessment.