Image-Based Natural Disaster Classification with Deep Learning: A Comparative Analysis

Natural disasters, including earthquakes, cyclones, floods, and wildfires, cause significant environmental damage and have emerged as a major global issue. These events can result in loss of life and disrupt communities and economy. Effective disaster management relies on timely and accurate information. With social media becoming a primary source of real-time information during such events, many images of these disasters are shared, though some may not be accurately labeled. Therefore, the purpose of this study is classifying natural disaster images, mainly cyclone, wildfire, flood, earthquake from social media images. This paper is to conduct a comparative analysis over 4 models namely VGG16, VGG19, EfficientNetB0, and ResNet-50. This paper uses a dataset that contains 4428 human-annotated images including cyclones, earthquakes, floods, and wildfires. Results concluded that ResNet-50 and EfficientNetB0 give the best result with both got over 96% average accuracy. ResNet-50 delivers more stable and more convergent results compared to EfficientNetB0, but it delivers slightly less classification accuracy. VGG16 and VGG19 are both outclassed in terms of accuracy, but better in training time, with VGG19 having a more convergent result.