Framework for Cross-Disaster Building Damage Assessment Using Cost-Sensitive Learning

Abstract

Rapid and reliable assessment of structural damage following disasters is critical for prioritizing rescue operations. In this study, we present a unified deep learning framework for building damage assessment from satellite imagery. The proposed approach integrates segmentation-driven feature construction, morphological processing, cost-sensitive learning, and cross-disaster evaluation to support robust performance under limited and imbalanced data conditions. The framework combines an adapted U-Net for building localization with a hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN)-deep neural network (DNN) classifier for damage-level prediction and evaluates transferability across disaster events, geographic regions, and sensing conditions. The proposed method is evaluated on selected events from the xView2 Building Damage Assessment (xBD) and BRIGHT datasets, using optical imagery from xBD and pre-disaster optical and post-disaster Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery from BRIGHT. Despite the limited and highly imbalanced event-specific samples, the framework achieves a mean cross-validation macro-F1 score of 70% and a maximum fold-level score of 77% on the Mexico earthquake subset of xBD and up to 98% on earthquake-related events in BRIGHT. Cross-validation characterizes performance variability across source-image-grouped data partitions, while cross-disaster evaluation reveals event-dependent transferability and provides a preliminary indication that structural domain similarity may be related to transfer performance. Although the evaluation is constrained by data availability, the results indicate that lightweight, cost-sensitive deep learning frameworks may support auxiliary post-disaster screening and decision support in resource-constrained scenarios. This study highlights both the potential and the remaining challenges of deploying artificial intelligence (AI) for rapid post-disaster assessment.