Object detection using convolutional neural networks for natural disaster recovery

Natural disasters cause a great damage to human life. As these disasters occur naturally, no one can able to stop their occurrences. But for recovery there is a team named Disaster management or emergency management which helps in recovery of human loss. As recovering and analyzing the objects is not easy, it will be a tough challenge for Disaster management team to identify and process large amount of data in real-time. To make this simple and easy Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models are used for object detection of disaster's aftermath. As there are various types of natural disasters such as hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, earthquakes etc., this study focuses on floods and earthquake images for object detection by using neural networks which has the ability to recognize objects easily. The network is processed on the DISASTER dataset which contains 2423 images out of which 1073 images belong to Flood and 1350 images belong to Earthquake. In this study ResNet50, VGG-16 and VGG-19 pre-trained models are used. These pre-trained models are CNN models which have been already trained on some sort of data. By using pre-trained models it will be more easy for object detection of flood and earthquake images. Among the three pre-trained models VGG-19 gets highest accuracy of 94.22%. As this study focused on floods and earthquake images for object detection. In future, by using different dataset and different images object detection will be done which will be helpful for recovery of human loss. © 2020 WITPress. All rights reserved.