Rapid building damage assessment workflow: An implementation for the 2023 Rolling Fork, Mississippi tornado event

Understand

Rapid and accurate building damage assessments from high-resolution satellite imagery following a natural disaster is essential to inform and optimize first responder efforts.

• However, performing such building damage assessments in an automated manner is non-trivial due to the challenges posed by variations in disaster-specific damage, diversity in satellite imagery, and the dearth of extensive, labeled datasets.
• To circumvent these issues, this paper introduces a human-in-the-loop workflow for rapidly training building damage assessment models after a natural disaster.
• This article details a case study using this workflow, executed in partnership with the American Red Cross during a tornado event in Rolling Fork, Mississippi in March, 2023.