Large‐scale building damage assessment using a novel hierarchical transformer architecture on satellite images
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents damage assessment using a hierarchical transformer architecture (DAHiTrA), a novel deep-learning model with hierarchical transformers to classify building damages based on satellite images in the aftermath of natural disasters. Satellite imagery provides real-time and high-coverage information and offers opportunities to inform large-scale postdisaster building damage assessment, which is critical for rapid emergency response. In this work, a novel transformer-based network is proposed for assessing building damage. This network leverages hierarchical spatial features of multiple resolutions and captures the temporal differences in the feature domain after applying a transformer encoder to the spatial features. The proposed network achieves state-of-the-art performance when tested on a large-scale disaster damage data set (xBD) for building localization and damage classification, as well as on LEVIR-CD data set for change detection tasks. In addition, this work introduces a new high-resolution satellite imagery data set, Ida-BD (related to 2021 Hurricane Ida in Louisiana) for domain adaptation. Further, it demonstrates an approach of using this data set by adapting the model with limited fine-tuning and hence applying the model to newly damaged areas with scarce data.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it