Generalizable Disaster Damage Assessment via Change Detection with Vision Foundation Model

The increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters demand more sophisticated approaches for rapid and precise damage assessment. To tackle this issue, researchers have developed various methods on disaster benchmark datasets from satellite imagery to aid in detecting disaster damage. However, the diverse nature of geographical landscapes and disasters makes it challenging to apply existing methods to regions unseen during training. We present DAVI (Disaster Assessment with VIsion foundation model), which overcomes domain disparities and detects structural damage (e.g., building) without requiring ground-truth labels of the target region. DAVI integrates task-specific knowledge from a model trained on source regions with an image segmentation foundation model to generate pseudo labels of possible damage in the target region. It then employs a two-stage refinement process, targeting both the pixel and overall image, to more accurately pinpoint changes in disaster-struck areas based on before-and-after images. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that DAVI achieves exceptional performance across diverse terrains (e.g., USA and Mexico) and disaster types (e.g., wildfires, hurricanes, and earthquakes). This confirms its robustness in assessing disaster impact without dependence on ground-truth labels.