Large-scale Building Damage Assessment using a

Novel Hierarchical Transformer Architecture on

Satellite Images
Authors: Navjot Kaur1, Cheng-Chun Lee2, Ali Mostafavi2, Ali Mahdavi-Amiri1
DOI: 10.1111/mice.12981

Presented By: Shahzaib Asif

1. School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada

2. Urban Resilience.AI Lab, Texas A&M University, Texas, USA (Oct, 2023)
 Research Article Overview

A novel transformer-based network is proposed for assessing building damage

This paper introduces the DAHiTrA model, which 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.
Proposed network achieves state-of-the-art performance when tested on a large-scale
disaster damage data set (xBD), as well as LEVIR-CD
 Proposed Model - DAHiTrA
DAHiTrA (Damage Assessment using Hierarchical Transformer Architecture)
Hierarchical transformers: DAHiTrA uses a hierarchical UNet-based architecture with
transformer modules to learn multiresolution features and temporal differences between pre-
and post-disaster images.

Difference blocks: DAHiTrA uses difference blocks that map the features of pre- and
post-disaster images onto a common domain using transformer encoders, take the absolute
difference, and then use transformer decoders to map the features back to the spatial domain.

Domain adaptation: DAHiTrA introduces a new high-resolution satellite imagery data set, Ida-BD,
related to the 2021 Hurricane Ida in Louisiana, and demonstrates how to adapt the model to
newly damaged areas with scarce data using transfer learning.

State-of-the-art performance: DAHiTrA outperforms existing methods for building damage

classification and change detection tasks on the xBD and LEVIR-CD data sets.
 Proposed Model - DAHiTrA
Model Architecture
 Dataset used
The performance of the proposed model was tested on the following datasets:

1. xBD dataset: This dataset was used for disaster damage detection and classification tasks. It
provides high-resolution satellite imagery with building segmentation and damage-level labels
from 19 disaster events such as floods and earthquakes.
2. LEVIR-CD dataset: This dataset was used for change detection tasks. It is specifically
designed for change detection in satellite imagery.
3. Ida-BD dataset: This is a new high-resolution satellite imagery dataset related to the 2021
Hurricane Ida in Louisiana. It was used for domain adaptation and to explore the model's
performance on newly damaged areas with scarce data.
 Dataset used

TABLE: Class-wise representation of damage xBD dataset (Gupta et al., 2019).

 Dataset used

TABLE: Class-wise pixels count distribution in xBD data set and the corresponding weights used in training
 Results and Evaluation
Performance Metrics on xBD, LEVIR-CD, and Ida-BD Datasets

TABLE: Average quantitative results for damage classification on the xBD dataset.
 Conclusion and Future Work
This work contributes to the field of computer-aided civil and infrastructure engineering by
providing a novel and effective technique for large-scale building damage assessment
using satellite imagery. Future work can explore other transformer-based architectures,
data augmentation techniques, and domain adaptation methods to further improve the
model’s performance and generalization. The proposed model can assist emergency
responders and decision-makers in rapid and accurate damage assessment, which is
critical for disaster recovery and resilience.
Appendix