A novel approach for infrastructural disaster damage assessment using high spatial resolution satellite and UAV imageries using deep learning algorithms.
Authors: Gupta Saurabh , Nair Syam 
Published: February 2023

Natural and man-made disasters pose a threat to human life, flora-fauna, and infrastructure. It is critical to detect the damage quickly and accurately for infrastructures right after the occurrence of any disaster. The detection and assessment of infrastructure damage help manage financial strategy as well. Recently, many researchers and agencies have made efforts to create high-resolution satellite imageries database related to pre and post-disaster events. The advanced remote sensing satellite imageries can reflect the surface of the earth accurately up to 30 cm spatial resolution on a daily basis. These high spatial resolutions (HSR) imageries can help access any natural hazard's damage by comparing the pre- and post-disaster data. These remote sensing imageries have limitations, such as cloud occlusions. Building under a thick cloud cannot be recognised in optical images. The manual assessment of the severity of damage to buildings/infrastructure by comparing bi-temporal HSR imageries or airborne will be a tedious and subjective job. On the other hand, the emerging use of unmanned aired vehicles (UAV) can be used to assess the situation precisely. The high-resolution UAV imageries and the HSR satellite imageries can complement each other for critical infrastructure damage assessment. In this study, a novel approach is used to integrate UAV data into HSR satellite imageries for the building damage assessment using a convolution neural network (CNN) based deep learning model. The research work is divided into two fundamental sub-tasks: first is the building localisation in the pre-event images, and second is the damage classification by assigning a unique damage level label reflecting the degree of damage to each building instance on the post-disaster images. For the study, the HSR satellite imageries of 36 pairs of pre- and post natural hazard events is acquired for the year 2021-22, similarly available UAV based data for these events is also collected from the open data source. The data is then pre-processed, and the building damage is assessed using a deep object-based semantic change detection framework (ChangeOS). The mentioned model was trained on the xview2 building damage assessment datasets comprised of ~20,000 images with ~730,000 building polygons of pre and post disaster events over the globe from 2011-2018. The experimental setup in this study includes training on the global dataset and testing on the regional-scale building damage assessment using HSR satellite imageries and local-scale using UAV imageries. The result obtained from the bi-temporal assessment of HSR images for the Indonesia Earthquake 2022 has shown an F1 score of ~67%, while the Uttarakhand flooding event 2021 has reported an F1 score of ~64%. The HSR imageries from the UAV Haiti earthquake event in 2011 have also shown less but promising F1 scores of ~54%. It is inferred that merging HSR imageries from satellite and UAV for building damage assessment using the ChangeOS framework represents a robust tool to further promote future research in infrastructure maintenance strategy and policy management in disaster response.