Generalizable Disaster Damage Assessment via Change Detection with Vision Foundation Model
This addresses the challenge of rapid and accurate damage assessment for disaster response by enabling generalization to new regions without labeled data, though it is incremental as it builds on existing vision models and change detection techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of generalizing disaster damage assessment to unseen regions by introducing DAVI, a method that uses a vision foundation model and pseudo labels to detect building-level structural damage without ground-truth labels, achieving exceptional performance across diverse terrains and disaster types as demonstrated in a case study on the 2023 Türkiye earthquake.
The increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters call for rapid and accurate damage assessment. In response, disaster benchmark datasets from high-resolution satellite imagery have been constructed to develop methods for detecting damaged areas. However, these methods face significant challenges when applied to previously unseen regions due to the limited geographical and disaster-type diversity in the existing datasets. We introduce DAVI (Disaster Assessment with VIsion foundation model), a novel approach that addresses domain disparities and detects structural damage at the building level without requiring ground-truth labels for target regions. DAVI combines task-specific knowledge from a model trained on source regions with task-agnostic knowledge from an image segmentation model to generate pseudo labels indicating potential damage in target regions. It then utilizes a two-stage refinement process, which operate at both pixel and image levels, to accurately identify changes in disaster-affected areas. Our evaluation, including a case study on the 2023 Türkiye earthquake, demonstrates that our model achieves exceptional performance across diverse terrains (e.g., North America, Asia, and the Middle East) and disaster types (e.g., wildfires, hurricanes, and tsunamis). This confirms its robustness in disaster assessment without dependence on ground-truth labels and highlights its practical applicability.