Timely assessment of integrity of structures after seismic events is crucial for public safety and emergency response. This study focuses on assessing the structural damage conditions using deep learning methods to detect exposed steel reinforcement in concrete buildings and bridges after large earthquakes. Steel bars are typically exposed after concrete spalling or large flexural or shear cracks. The amount and distribution of exposed steel reinforcement is an indication of structural damage and degradation. To automatically detect exposed steel bars, new datasets of images collected after the 2023 Turkey Earthquakes were labeled to represent a wide variety of damaged concrete structures. The proposed method builds upon a deep learning framework, enhanced with fine-tuning, data augmentation, and testing on public datasets. An automated classification framework is developed that can be used to identify inside/outside buildings and structural components. Then, a YOLOv11 (You Only Look Once) model is trained to detect cracking and spalling damage and exposed bars. Another YOLO model is finetuned to distinguish different categories of structural damage levels. All these trained models are used to create a hybrid framework to automatically and reliably determine the damage levels from input images. This research demonstrates that rapid and automated damage detection following disasters is achievable across diverse damage contexts by utilizing image data collection, annotation, and deep learning approaches.

It is of crucial importance to assess damages promptly and accurately in humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HADR). Current deep learning approaches struggle to generalize effectively due to the imbalance of data classes, scarcity of moderate damage examples, and human inaccuracy in pixel labeling during HADR situations. To accommodate for these limitations and exploit state-of-the-art techniques in vision-language models (VLMs) to fuse imagery with human knowledge understanding, there is an opportunity to generate a diversified set of image-based damage data effectively. Our initial experimental results suggest encouraging data generation quality, which demonstrates an improvement in classifying scenes with different levels of structural damage to buildings, roads, and infrastructures.

Safety is a critical aspect of the air transport system given even slight operational anomalies can result in serious consequences. To reduce the chances of aviation safety occurrences, accidents and incidents are reported to establish the root cause, propose safety recommendations etc. However, analysis narratives of the pre-accident events are presented using human-understandable, raw, unstructured, text that a computer system cannot understand. The ability to classify and categorise safety occurrences from their textual narratives would help aviation industry stakeholders make informed safety-critical decisions. To classify and categorise safety occurrences, we applied natural language processing (NLP) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) models to process text narratives. The study aimed to answer the question. How well can the damage level caused to the aircraft in a safety occurrence be inferred from the text narrative using natural language processing. The classification performance of various deep learning models including LSTM, BLSTM, GRU, sRNN, and combinations of these models including LSTM and GRU, BLSTM+GRU, sRNN and LSTM, sRNN and BLSTM, sRNN and GRU, sRNN and BLSTM and GRU, and sRNN and LSTM and GRU was evaluated on a set of 27,000 safety occurrence reports from the NTSB. The results of this study indicate that all models investigated performed competitively well recording an accuracy of over 87.9% which is well above the random guess of 25% for a four-class classification problem. Also, the models recorded high precision, recall, and F1 scores above 80%, 88%, and 85%, respectively. sRNN slightly outperformed other single models in terms of recall (90%) and accuracy (90%) while LSTM reported slightly better performance in terms of precision (87%).

Given the paramount importance of safety in the aviation industry, even minor operational anomalies can have significant consequences. Comprehensive documentation of incidents and accidents serves to identify root causes and propose safety measures. However, the unstructured nature of incident event narratives poses a challenge for computer systems to interpret. Our study aimed to leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) and deep learning models to analyze these narratives and classify the aircraft damage level incurred during safety occurrences. Through the implementation of LSTM, BLSTM, GRU, and sRNN deep learning models, our research yielded promising results, with all models showcasing competitive performance, achieving an accuracy of over 88% significantly surpassing the 25% random guess threshold for a four-class classification problem. Notably, the sRNN model emerged as the top performer in terms of recall and accuracy, boasting a remarkable 89%. These findings underscore the potential of NLP and deep learning models in extracting actionable insights from unstructured text narratives, particularly in evaluating the extent of aircraft damage within the realm of aviation safety occurrences.

Electronic service quality (E-SQ) is a strategic metric for successful e-services.Among the service quality dimensions, tangibility is overlooked. However, by incorporating visuals or tangible tools, the intangible nature of e-services can be balanced. Thanks to advancements in Deep Learning for computer vision, tangible visual features can now be leveraged to enhance the browsing and searching experience of electronic services. Users usually have specific search criteria to meet, but most services will not offer flexible search filters. This research emphasizes the importance of integrating visual and descriptive features to improve the tangibility and efficiency of e-services. A prime example of an electronic service that can benefit from this is real-estate websites. Searching for real estate properties that match user preferences is usually demanding and lacks visual filters, such as the Damage Level to the property. The research introduces a novel visual descriptive feature, the Damage Level, which utilizes a deep learning network known as Mask-RCNN to estimate damage in real estate images. Additionally, a model is developed to incorporate the Damage Level as a tangible feature in electronic real estate services, with the aim of enhancing the tangible customer experience.

The primary goal of structural health monitoring is to detect damage at its onset before it reaches a critical level. The in-depth investigation in the present work addresses deep learning applied to data-driven damage detection in nonlinear dynamic systems. In particular, autoencoders (AEs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs) are implemented leveraging on 1D convolutional neural networks. The onset of damage is detected in the investigated nonlinear dynamic systems by exciting random vibrations of varying intensity, without prior knowledge of the system or the excitation and in unsupervised manner. The comprehensive numerical study is conducted on dynamic systems exhibiting different types of nonlinear behavior. An experimental application related to a magneto-elastic nonlinear system is also presented to corroborate the conclusions.

Satellite imagery has played an increasingly important role in post-disaster building damage assessment. Unfortunately, current methods still rely on manual visual interpretation, which is often time-consuming and can cause very low accuracy. To address the limitations of manual interpretation, there has been a significant increase in efforts to automate the process. We present a solution that performs the two most important tasks in building damage assessment, segmentation and classification, through deep-learning models. We show our results submitted as part of the xView2 Challenge, a competition to design better models for identifying buildings and their damage level after exposure to multiple kinds of natural disasters. Our best model couples a building identification semantic segmentation convolutional neural network (CNN) to a building damage classification CNN, with a combined F1 score of 0.66, surpassing the xView2 challenge baseline F1 score of 0.28. We find that though our model was able to identify buildings with relatively high accuracy, building damage classification across various disaster types is a difficult task due to the visual similarity between different damage levels and different damage distribution between disaster types, highlighting the fact that it may be important to have a probabilistic prior estimate regarding disaster damage in order to obtain accurate predictions.

We explore the implementation of deep learning techniques for precise building damage assessment in the context of natural hazards, utilizing remote sensing data. The xBD dataset, comprising diverse disaster events from across the globe, serves as the primary focus, facilitating the evaluation of deep learning models. We tackle the challenges of generalization to novel disasters and regions while accounting for the influence of low-quality and noisy labels inherent in natural hazard data. Furthermore, our investigation quantitatively establishes that the minimum satellite imagery resolution essential for effective building damage detection is 3 meters and below 1 meter for classification using symmetric and asymmetric resolution perturbation analyses. To achieve robust and accurate evaluations of building damage detection and classification, we evaluated different deep learning models with residual, squeeze and excitation, and dual path network backbones, as well as ensemble techniques. Overall, the U-Net Siamese network ensemble with F-1 score of 0.812 performed the best against the xView2 challenge benchmark. Additionally, we evaluate a Universal model trained on all hazards against a flood expert model and investigate generalization gaps across events, and out of distribution from field data in the Ahr Valley. Our research findings showcase the potential and limitations of advanced AI solutions in enhancing the impact assessment of climate change-induced extreme weather events, such as floods and hurricanes. These insights have implications for disaster impact assessment in the face of escalating climate challenges.

This study aims to enable more reliable automated post-disaster building damage classification using artificial intelligence (AI) and multi-view imagery. The current practices and research efforts in adopting AI for post-disaster damage assessment are generally (a) qualitative, lacking refined classification of building damage levels based on standard damage scales, and (b) trained based on aerial or satellite imagery with limited views, which, although indicative, are not completely descriptive of the damage scale. To enable more accurate and reliable automated quantification of damage levels, the present study proposes the use of more comprehensive visual data in the form of multiple ground and aerial views of the buildings. To have such a spatially-aware damage prediction model, a Multi-view Convolution Neural Network (MV-CNN) architecture is used that combines the information from different views of a damaged building. This spatial 3D context damage information will result in more accurate identification of damages and reliable quantification of damage levels. The proposed model is trained and validated on reconnaissance visual dataset containing expert-labeled, geotagged images of the inspected buildings following hurricane Harvey. The developed model demonstrates reasonably good accuracy in predicting the damage levels and can be used to support more informed and reliable AI-assisted disaster management practices.

ICHEC, the national high-performance computing authority of Ireland, recently participated in the xView2 disaster recovery challenge run by the US Defense Innovation Unit and other Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Recovery (HADR) organisations. Models developed during the challenge including those developed at ICHEC are currently being tested by agencies responding to the ongoing bushfires in Australia. XView2 Challenge is based on using high resolution imagery to see the details of specific damage conditions in overhead imagery of a disaster area. The challenge involved building AI models to locate and classify the severity of damage to buildings using pairs of pre and post disaster satellite images. Models like these allow those responding to disasters to rapidly assess the damage left in their wake, enabling more effective response efforts and potentially saving lives.