This paper presents a building detection approach based on HSV color space. The method is based on the gray level histogram features, which can separate the housing construction units from complex background. A building damage detection algorithm based on regional statistical information is also proposed in this paper, and a set of performance parameters of feature vector is studied to identify the extent of the housing collapse. The experiments on Haiti post-earthquake images from Google Earth and Yushu post-earthquake images from Internet are discussed in the paper. The experimental results show that proposed approach is effective and feasible.