The characteristics of severely damaged buildings were examined by image processing of aerial television images taken after the 1999 Kocaeli, Turkey, the 1999 Chi-Chi, Taiwan and the 2001 Gujarat, India earthquakes. In image processing, color indices and edge elements calculated from the post event images were used. After pixels indicating damaged buildings were detected, the texture analysis of the image was attempted to identify the areas corresponding to the size of buildings. The extracted areas almost corresponded to the results of visual inspection. We found that the threshold values to judge damaged buildings should be determined for each image or for the images having similar built environment and damage pattern.