Toward Scalable Damage Assessment for Rapid Disaster Response

Current research and development efforts at DLR`s Center for Satellite Based Crisis Information (ZKI) focus on deploying automated image analysis methods as part of rapid mapping processing routines. The use of machine learning methods enables processing of large amounts of heterogeneous satellite, aerial and drone images at varying spatial scales and temporal frequencies. In this work, we introduce an automated and scalable image processing chain for rapid building damage assessment, optimize it for inference on different hardware and provide application examples from recent natural disasters. We show the scalability of the method from high-frequency live-mapping with drones on a laptop to large-scale processing of satellite and aerial images on a high-performance computing cluster.