Open Access Battle Damage Detection via Pixel-Wise T-Test on Sentinel-1 Imagery
It provides reproducible and explainable damage estimates for the public and humanitarian practitioners in conflict areas like Gaza and Ukraine, though it is incremental as it builds on statistical change detection methods.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting building damage in conflict zones by introducing the Pixel-Wise T-Test method, which achieves building-level accuracy with AUC=0.88 in Ukraine and 0.81 in Gaza using open-access data.
In the context of recent, highly destructive conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, reliable estimates of building damage are essential for an informed public discourse, human rights monitoring, and humanitarian aid provision. Given the contentious nature of conflict damage assessment, these estimates must be fully reproducible, explainable, and derived from open access data. This paper introduces a new method for building damage detection-- the Pixel-Wise T-Test (PWTT)-- that satisfies these conditions. Using a combination of freely-available synthetic aperture radar imagery and statistical change detection, the PWTT generates accurate conflict damage estimates across a wide area at regular time intervals. Accuracy is assessed using an original dataset of over half a million labeled building footprints spanning 12 cities across Ukraine, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq. Despite being simple and lightweight, the algorithm achieves building-level accuracy statistics (AUC=0.88 across Ukraine, 0.81 in Gaza) rivalling state of the art methods that use deep learning and high resolution imagery. The workflow is open source and deployed entirely within the Google Earth Engine environment, allowing for the generation of interactive Battle Damage Dashboards for Ukraine and Gaza that update in near-real time, allowing the public and humanitarian practitioners to immediately get estimates of damaged buildings in a given area.