Multi-class Seismic Building Damage Assessment from InSAR Imagery using Quadratic Variational Causal Bayesian Inference
This work addresses rapid regional-scale building damage assessment for emergency response planning, representing a strong specific gain with incremental methodological improvements.
The paper tackled the problem of multi-class building damage assessment from InSAR imagery by developing a variational causal Bayesian inference framework, achieving up to 35.7% improvement in classification accuracy (AUC: 0.94-0.96) and reducing computational overhead by over 40% across five major earthquakes.
Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technology uses satellite radar to detect surface deformation patterns and monitor earthquake impacts on buildings. While vital for emergency response planning, extracting multi-class building damage classifications from InSAR data faces challenges: overlapping damage signatures with environmental noise, computational complexity in multi-class scenarios, and the need for rapid regional-scale processing. Our novel multi-class variational causal Bayesian inference framework with quadratic variational bounds provides rigorous approximations while ensuring efficiency. By integrating InSAR observations with USGS ground failure models and building fragility functions, our approach separates building damage signals while maintaining computational efficiency through strategic pruning. Evaluation across five major earthquakes (Haiti 2021, Puerto Rico 2020, Zagreb 2020, Italy 2016, Ridgecrest 2019) shows improved damage classification accuracy (AUC: 0.94-0.96), achieving up to 35.7% improvement over existing methods. Our approach maintains high accuracy (AUC > 0.93) across all damage categories while reducing computational overhead by over 40% without requiring extensive ground truth data.