Convolutional neural network based hurricane damage detection using satellite images

Hurricanes are tropical storms that cause immense damage to human life and property. Rapid assessment of damage caused by hurricanes is extremely important for the first responders. But this process is usually slow, expensive, labor intensive and prone to errors. The advancements in remote sensing and computer vision help in observing Earth at a different scale. In this paper, a new Convolutional Neural Network model has been designed with the help of satellite images captured from the areas affected by hurricanes. The model will be able to assess the damage by detecting damaged and undamaged buildings based upon which the relief aid can be provided to the affected people on an immediate basis. The model is composed of five convolutional layers, five pooling layers, one flattening layer, one dropout layer and two dense layers. Hurricane Harvey dataset consisting of 23,000 images of size 128 × 128 pixels has been used in this paper. The proposed model is simulated on 5750 test images at a learning rate of 0.00001 and 30 epochs with the Adam optimizer obtaining an accuracy of 0.95 and precision of 0.97. The proposed model will help the emergency responders to determine whether there has been damage or not due to the hurricane and also help those to provide relief aid to the affected people.