Abstract
Accurate and timely assessment of post-disaster building damage is of great significance for national development and social security concerns. However, due to the high timeliness requirements of disaster emergency response and the conflict that sufficient computing resources are not easily available in harsh environments, and therefore the lightweight AI-driven post-disaster building damage assessment model is highly needed. In this paper, we introduced a knowledge distillation-based lightweight approach for assessing building damage from xBD high-resolution satellite images with the purpose of reducing the dependence on computing resources in disaster emergency response scenarios. Specifically, an ensemble Teacher-Student knowledge distillation method was designed and compared with the xBD baseline model. The result has shown that, the knowledge distillation reduces the parameter number of the original model by 30%, and the inference speed is increased by 30%-40%. In the building localization task, the accuracy of teacher and student model are 0.879 and 0.832 (IOU) respectively. In the damage classification task, the accuracy of teacher and student are 0.798 and 0.775 respectively. In addition, we proposed a dual-teacher-student knowledge distillation strategy, which cannot use the pre-training skills of curriculum learning in student model training, but achieve the same effect through more direct knowledge transfer. In the experiment, our dual-teacher-student method improves the knowledge distillation baseline by 3.7% with 30 epoch training. With only 70% parameters, our student model performs close to the teacher model at a degradation within 5%.This study verifies the effectiveness and prospect of knowledge distillation method in building damage assessment for disaster emergency.
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Data availability
The xBD dataset is available at URL(https://xview2.org/)
Code availability
Yes, The code is available at URL(https://github.com/SmartDataLab/building_damage_kd)
Notes
References
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Public Computing Cloud, Renmin University of China.
Funding
This work was jointly supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under grants 62206301; Public Health & Disease Control and Prevention, Fund for Building World-Class Universities (Disciplines) of Renmin University of China. Project No. 2022PDPC; fund for building world-class universities (disciplines) of Renmin University of China. Project No. KYGJA2022001; fund for building world-class universities (disciplines) of Renmin University of China. Project No. KYGJF2021001; Beijing Golden Bridge Project seed fund. Project No. ZZ21021 and the Wine Group’s research grant opportunity No. 09202188.
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Yanbing Bai is responsible for Conceptualization, methodology, resources, writing—original draft preparation, writing—review and editing, supervision, project administration, funding acquisition; Jinhua Su is responsible for conceptualization, methodology, software, validation, and formal analysis, visualization; Yulong Zou is responsible for software, validation, and formal analysis, visualization; Bruno ADRIANO is responsible for investigation, writing—original draft preparation, writing—review and editing.
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Bai, Y., Su, J., Zou, Y. et al. Knowledge distillation based lightweight building damage assessment using satellite imagery of natural disasters. Geoinformatica 27, 237–261 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-022-00480-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-022-00480-3