Detecting Damaged Buildings on Post-Hurricane Satellite Imagery Based on Customized Convolutional Neural Networks

After a hurricane, damage assessment is critical to emergency managers and first responders so that resources can be planned and allocated appropriately. One way to gauge the damage extent is to detect and quantify the number of damaged buildings, which is traditionally done through driving around the affected area. This process can be labor intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, utilizing the availability and readiness of satellite imagery, we propose to improve the efficiency and accuracy of damage detection via image classification algorithms. From the building coordinates, we extract their aerial-view windows of appropriate size and classify whether a building is damaged or not. We demonstrate the result of our method in the case study of 2017 Hurricane Harvey.