arXiv AI

A Decade of PhotoMappers: A Longitudinal Study of Crowdsourced Disaster Photos Geolocalization with Vision-Language Models and Geospatial Reasoning

arXiv AI
Oct 2

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 Computer Vision
Aug 27

GTPred: Benchmarking MLLMs for Interpretable Geo-localization and Time-of-capture Prediction

GTPred is a new benchmark for geo‑temporal prediction that evaluates multi‑modal large language models (MLLMs) on 370 images taken across 120 years worldwide. It assesses predictions by matching both the year and a hierarchical location sequence, and includes annotated reasoning chains to test intermediate reasoning. Experiments on 15 MLLMs show that while visual perception is strong, models still lack world knowledge and geo‑temporal reasoning, and that adding temporal data improves location inference.

By Jinnao Li, Tingzhu Chen, Changbo Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 26

PlaceSeek: Human-Centered Geospatial Retrieval of Urban Outdoor Places via Semantic Grounding and Affective Alignment

PlaceSeek is a human‑centered geospatial retrieval framework that maps natural‑language queries to street‑view images by decomposing queries into functional and affective sub‑intents. It uses a Semantic Grounding Module to verify that candidate images contain the physical evidence needed for the intended activity, and an Affective Alignment Module to re‑rank these candidates based on human urban perception judgments. Evaluated on 31,956 Milan street‑view locations, PlaceSeek achieves high precision and ranking metrics, outperforming several vision‑language baselines and demonstrating the importance of both physical grounding and affective alignment for complex urban spatial queries.

By Ziqi Cui, Shangyu Lou
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