Building damage assessment for rapid disaster response with a deep object-based semantic change detection framework: From natural disasters to man-made disasters

Abstract Sudden-onset natural and man-made disasters represent a threat to the safety of human life and property. Rapid and accurate building damage assessment using bitemporal high spatial resolution (HSR) remote sensing images can quickly and safely provide us with spatial distribution information and statistics of the damage degree to assist with humanitarian assistance and disaster response. For building damage assessment, strong feature representation and semantic consistency are the keys to obtaining a high accuracy. However, the conventional object-based image analysis (OBIA) framework using a patch-based convolutional neural network (CNN) can guarantee semantic consistency, but with weak feature representation, while the Siamese fully convolutional network approach has strong feature representation capabilities but is semantically inconsistent. In this paper, we propose a deep object-based semantic change detection framework, called ChangeOS, for building damage assessment. To seamlessly integrate OBIA and deep learning, we adopt a deep object localization network to generate accurate building objects, in place of the superpixel segmentation commonly used in the conventional OBIA framework. Furthermore, the deep object localization network and deep damage classification network are integrated into a unified semantic change detection network for end-to-end building damage assessment. This also provides deep object features that can supply an object prior to the deep damage classification network for more consistent semantic feature representation. Object-based post-processing is adopted to further guarantee the semantic consistency of each object. The experimental results obtained on a global scale dataset including 19 natural disaster events and two local scale datasets including the Beirut port explosion event and the Bata military barracks explosion event show that ChangeOS is superior to the currently published methods in speed and accuracy, and has a superior generalization ability for man-made disasters.