arXiv AI

Advancing All-Weather Building Damage Mapping to the Instance Level: Outcomes and Insights from the 2026 Bright Challenge

arXiv:2607. 22746v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapid post-disaster response requires timely, building-level information on whether structures remain intact, are damaged, or are destroyed.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

DisasterInsight: A Building-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Vision--Language Models in Disaster Response

DisasterInsight is a building‑centric benchmark designed to evaluate vision‑language models (VLMs) for disaster response. Built on the xBD satellite dataset, it adds OpenStreetMap‑derived functional labels to 134,108 building instances and offers 15 task types, including instance assessment, scene counting, multi‑instance reasoning, and structured report generation. Experiments show that VLMs excel at visible damage detection but struggle with building function, multi‑instance reasoning, counting, and grounded reporting, and instruction tuning only partially mitigates these gaps.

By Sara Tehrani, Yonghao Xu, Leif Haglund, Amanda Berg, Gulnaz Zhambulova, Michael Felsberg
arXiv AI
2d ago

Decoding the Disaster: Multi-Task Geospatial Reasoning with Vision-Language Models and Crowdsourced Imagery for Disaster Mapping

The paper introduces GRDisaster, a multi-task geospatial reasoning framework that leverages vision‑language models to interpret, geolocalize, and assess damage in crowdsourced disaster imagery. It builds on a new benchmark dataset of 26,340 images from PhotoMappers, linking volunteer geographic information, street‑view imagery, and remote sensing data across multiple disaster events from 2018 to 2024. GRDisaster combines deterministic and probabilistic cross‑view geolocalization with multi‑view fusion, and introduces spatial reasoning indicators to validate cross‑view matches and quantify disaster severity using expert‑verified annotations.

By Wenping Yin, Fabian Desuer, Ziqi Liu, Naixia Mou, Weijia Li, Pedram Ghamisi, Xiao Xiang Zhu, Hao Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Obshazard-bench: Benchmarking Multimodal Foundation Models for Real-Time Disaster Intelligence from Raw Earth Observation Streams

arXiv:2608. 00012v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to interpret Earth observation data, yet their capability to support real-world disaster emergency response remains insufficiently evaluated.

By Fengxiang Wang, Qiuyang Yu, Yueying Li, Mingshuo Chen, Chengchi Fei, Kaiyi Xu, Lixin Gu, Wangxu Wei, Junchao Gong, Lipeng Ma, Jiong Wang, Fenghua Ling, Wenlong Zhang, Xue Yang, Wenjing Yang, Ben Fei, Long Lan
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Looks Can be Deceiving: Annotator and Reviewer Performance Across Imagery Sources in Crowd-Sourced Aerial Damage Assessment

arXiv:2608. 14942v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents the first known empirical investigation of annotator and reviewer performance across multi-source remotely sensed imagery, evaluating human labeling across drone, crewed aviation, and satellite views.

By Thomas Manzini, Priyankari Perali, Raisa Karnik, Stephen Johnson, Robin R. Murphy
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Towards reliable multimodal disaster severity assessment through preference optimization and explainable vision-language reasoning

The paper introduces a two‑stage training framework that combines Supervised Fine‑Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to improve multimodal disaster severity assessment. It creates two datasets—ReasoningSet for validated rationales and PreferenceSet for paired rationales—using a single Human‑in‑the‑Loop workflow. Experiments on InternVL‑3‑8B and LLaVA‑1.5‑7B show that SFT boosts classification accuracy and Macro‑F1, while DPO further enhances interpretability and alignment with human judgment.

By Yuanjun Zhang, Fuzel Ahamed Shaik, Suvojit Acharjee, Fahad Khalid, Mourad Oussalah
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

A Sentinel-2 benchmark dataset for deep-learning active-fire segmentation across 25 California wildfires

The article introduces an open image dataset for active‑fire segmentation in satellite imagery, comprising 2,148 image‑mask pairs from 25 California wildfires captured between July 2020 and August 2026. Each 512×512 pixel, three‑channel image is a Sentinel‑2 Level‑2A composite of bands B12, B11, and B8A, with a fixed linear rendering applied uniformly. Masks distinguish background, short‑wave‑infrared rule‑based active fire, and invalid observations, and the dataset includes chip‑level metadata, an incident‑disjoint split, and a mask‑blind analyst review of 233 test chips.

By Shreyan Mitra, Mohammadreza Narimani, Parastoo Farajpoor
arXiv AI
Jul 16

Post-Disaster Affected Area Segmentation with a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based EVAP Model using Sentinel-2 and Formosat-5 Imagery

arXiv:2507. 16849v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a vision transformer (ViT)-based deep learning framework to refine disaster-affected area segmentation from remote sensing imagery, aiming to support and enhance the Emergent Value Added Product (EVAP) developed by the Taiwan Space Agency (TASA).

By Yi-Shan Chu, Hsuan-Cheng Wei