Skip to Main Content
AI for Good
book

AI for Good

by Juan M. Lavista Ferres, William B. Weeks, Brad Smith
April 2024
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
432 pages
9h 44m
English
Wiley
Audiobook available
Content preview from AI for Good

Chapter 14Post-Disaster Building Damage Assessment

—Shahrzad Gholami

Executive Summary

Climate change is accelerating the frequency and severity of natural disasters. Each year, natural disasters affect over 350 million people and cause trillions of dollars in damage. In the wake of those disasters, providing timely and appropriate emergency responses and humanitarian interventions like shelter, medical aid, and food can be challenging. Artificial intelligence frameworks that leverage available satellite imagery can support existing efforts to provide such interventions. Here, we develop a convolutional neural network model that uses high-resolution satellite imagery from before and after disasters to localize buildings and score their damage into four levels, ranging from not damaged to destroyed.

Due to the emergency nature of disaster response efforts, the value of automating damage assessment lies primarily in its speed, rather than its accuracy. When we compared our results to those generated during an international competition, our solution works three times faster than the fastest winning solution and over 50 times faster than the slowest first place solution. Our model achieved a pixel-wise F1 score of 0.74 for the building localization and a pixel-wise harmonic F1 score of 0.60 for damage classification—both indicators that our model was accurate. Further, our model used a simpler architecture compared to other efforts in the competition. To facilitate the use of ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

AI for Good

AI for Good

Juan M. Lavista Ferres, William B. Weeks
AI for Social Good

AI for Social Good

Rahul Dodhia
Generative AI

Generative AI

Martin Musiol
AI at the Edge

AI at the Edge

Daniel Situnayake, Jenny Plunkett

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781394235872Purchase Link