Quantum-Grassmann-Plucker Token Mixing for Deep Learning-Based Post-Disaster Damage Assessment

Timely post-disaster building damage assessment from satellite imagery is a critical engineering decision support task, yet it remains constrained by class imbalance, ambiguous intermediate damage states, and limited cross-event transferability. This study presents, to our knowledge, the first application of Grassmann-Plucker (GP) token mixing to computer vision and introduces two extensions for image classification: the Quantum-inspired Grassmann-Plucker (QGP) head and the Hybrid Quantum Machine Learning Grassmann-Plucker (HQML-GP) head. The GP head represents multiscale relationships among image patch tokens by encoding subspaces formed by token pairs with Plucker coordinates; QGP enriches these coordinates with amplitude-derived probability features, whereas HQML-GP incorporates expectation values generated by a simulated quantum circuit into the geometric token representation. Paired pre- and post-event image patches from the xBD tornado dataset were processed using a frozen six-channel Vision Transformer base encoder with 16 x 16-pixel patches. The three GP-based heads were compared with multilayer perceptron and Transformer baselines under identical training, checkpoint selection, and evaluation protocols. Joplin and Moore tornado samples were used for model development and seen-event testing, while Tuscaloosa was reserved for unseen-event evaluation. QGP led both test sets in accuracy and macro-F1: 83.46% and 64.50% for the seen events, and 66.45% and 52.70% for the unseen event. Although HQML-GP obtained the highest validation macro-F1 of 65.63%, it did not surpass QGP on either test set and required substantially more training time per epoch. These results establish GP token mixing as a competitive attention-free alternative to conventional Transformer-based token mixing for paired satellite image damage classification.

Looks Can be Deceiving: Annotator and Reviewer Performance Across Imagery Sources in Crowd-Sourced Aerial Damage Assessment

This paper presents the first known empirical investigation of annotator and reviewer performance across multi-source remotely sensed imagery, evaluating human labeling across drone, crewed aviation, and satellite views. Because existing aerial imagery datasets rely predominantly on single-source imagery, there is no currently established state of practice for efficiently allocating human labor to curate large-scale, multi-source aerial datasets. This work addresses this limitation by analyzing annotator and reviewer performance within a post-disaster building damage assessment dataset of 9 disasters, where 20041 buildings in drone, 20695 buildings in crewed aviation, and 33392 buildings in satellite imagery were labeled. These labels, provided by 187 annotators, were then refined through two successive quality-control stages: a single-reviewer pass followed by a consensus-committee review. Our analysis reveals two findings that raise questions for standard crowd-sourcing practices. First, initial annotations were revised by the final committee at rates that rise steeply from higher- to lower-resolution sources (25.27% for crewed aviation and 36.95% for satellite), with the same ordering at every observed workflow stage. Second, a single individual review reduced but did not resolve this disagreement: after review, the committee still revised 6.85% of drone, 14.05% of crewed, and 20.86% of satellite labels. These observations suggest that, in workflows like this one, uniform review allocation leaves the most residual disagreement in lower-resolution imagery. Based on this evidence, and consistent with prior work on adaptive task assignment and budget-aware quality control, this paper offers three recommendations for multi-source dataset curation.

Integrated Multimodal AI System for Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning, Object Sensing, and Damage Analysis

This work presents a unified multimodal AI system for damage assessment that integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models, thermal spectrum perception, vision foundation model pipelines, and exploratory wireless signal sensing. A RAG component is developed to ground a locally hosted language model in project-specific documentation, including specialized damage level classification criteria to mitigate hallucinations during inference. Controlled comparisons against static few-shot prompting demonstrate that dynamic retrieval improves grounding and factual consistency. We further compare vector-based RAG with a knowledge graph variant constructed via entity-relation extraction, and show that graph-based retrieval produces stronger responses for damage assessment queries requiring cross-document reasoning, motivating hybrid dense, sparse, and graph-aware retrieval. To address limitations of EO imagery under adverse lighting and weather conditions, infrared (IR)/thermal sensing is employed for object detection and segmentation. Our detectors generate candidate detections, yielding improved segmentation of a broad array of objects. Paired IR versus visible spectrum tracking experiments reveal failure modes, motivating multimodal fusion for robust object detection and damage analysis. Vision foundation and vision-language models are leveraged to generate synthetic damage imagery and classify damage severity with high accuracy, supporting training and validation of downstream damage assessment models. Finally, exploratory Wireless-based sensing demonstrates potential to detect presence, motion, and post-event environmental changes where EO and IR sensing are ineffective.

Adaptive Sampling for Automated Post-Disaster Rapid Damage Assessment via Level-Set Cost-Aware Bayesian Optimization

Natural disasters frequently inflict severe damage to the built environment, which demands a rapid, reliable, and cost-effective damage assessment for emergency response. However, traditional methods for post-disaster damage assessment often rely on static, labor-intensive data collection strategies that can be prohibitively expensive and struggle to adapt to dynamic post-disaster conditions. In this study, we propose a cost-aware Bayesian optimization framework combined with level-set estimation that continuously guides autonomous data collectors, e.g., an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), toward the most informative regions. By dynamically updating damage estimates across different geographic zones, our approach systematically reduces uncertainty while minimizing operational costs. The proposed framework is first validated using a controlled synthetic toy study, demonstrating the agent's ability to efficiently trace damage boundaries, recover the underlying damage map, and rapidly reduce predictive uncertainty. Furthermore, the approach is evaluated using high-fidelity disaster data generated by the Regional Resilience Determination (R2D) software. The results of the algorithm provide accurate and timely damage estimates that support informative and fast emergency response.

Large scale cross-regional remote sensing flood monitoring framework for operative mapping and impact analysis

Effective flood monitoring is critical for minimizing the impacts of flood disasters on populations and infrastructure. Yet reliable remote sensing across extensive and environmentally diverse regions remains challenging, as most segmentation algorithms lack the generalisation capacity required for large-scale application, while annotated flood data are scarce and unevenly distributed. This study presents an end-to-end multimodal framework for Russian Federation territories sustainable flood monitoring and damage assessment based on synthetic aperture radar data, multispectral imagery, and digital elevation models with their derivatives, forming a 21-channel input. Using a self-collected multimodal dataset covering seven Russian regions, two strategies for water surface detection under limited data conditions were compared: a supervised U-Net++ model and the self-supervised AnySat architecture pre-trained and fine-tuned for the segmentation task. Under the data conditions of this study, supervised learning proved more effective, while the AnySat-based approach offered greater stability and retains advantages for settings where larger unlabelled data or missing modalities at inference are expected. The best flood area predictions were used to estimate flood impact in urban areas in terms of the area affected, material damage, casualties, and ecological and agricultural impact. The estimations were conducted following the official methodology of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations. Applied to the 2019 Tulun flood, the obtained results closely matched official assessments, except for material damage, due to the open-source databases usage. The results demonstrate the potential of deep learning and multimodal satellite data integration for scalable, reliable flood monitoring across diverse environmental and data-limited conditions.

An Integrated Two-Stage Deep-Learning Tool for Rapid Post-Hurricane Damage Identification and Repair Scheduling

Post-hurricane damage assessment and repair scheduling can require computationally intensive simulation and optimization. This paper presents an integrated two-stage deep-learning tool for rapid damaged-line identification and repair-schedule computation. An available offline synthetic dataset for the IEEE 9500-node test feeder contains 1,700 hurricane scenarios with exposure features, grid metadata, fragility parameters, OpenDSS outputs, damaged-line labels, and Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search reference schedules. Stage 1 benchmarks MLP, ResMLP, and GraphSAGE, while Stage 2 compares MLP, DeepSets, and Set Transformer. The selected ResMLP-Set Transformer pipeline propagates Stage 1 errors into Stage 2 and achieves a damaged-job F1-score of 0.920, pairwise order agreement of 0.854, and start- and end-time mean absolute errors of 4.349 min and 4.486 min, respectively. The tool provides rapid initial repair-log decision support for new hurricane cases.

Multi-Modal Attention for Automated Disaster Damage Assessment Using Remote Sensing Imagery and Deep Learning

Timely and accurate disaster damage assessment is crucial for effective emergency response, resource allocation, and recovery. Traditional methods, which often rely on manual inspections or sparse data, are typically slow and error-prone. This paper introduces a novel framework leveraging remote sensing imagery and deep learning to automate building damage classification. Using pre- and post-disaster satellite imagery, our model categorizes buildings into four damage levels: no damage, minor damage, major damage, and destroyed. The core innovation is a multi-modal attention mechanism that fuses bi-temporal features to explicitly detect and assess structural changes. We employ a lightweight ConvNeXT-Tiny backbone to ensure efficient processing without compromising performance. Key contributions include: (1) a cross-attention module for multi-modal data fusion, (2) an optimized preprocessing pipeline for large-scale datasets, and (3) robust data augmentation techniques. Experiments on a large-scale disaster dataset demonstrate an overall classification accuracy of 94.90%. The model effectively discriminates between damage categories and remains resilient to incomplete data. This system significantly improves assessment speed and accuracy, aiding emergency responders in prioritizing interventions. This work advances automated disaster damage detection by integrating multi-temporal imagery with deep learning, offering a scalable solution for real-time response.

DART: A Vision-Language Foundation Model for Comprehensive Rope Condition Monitoring

The condition monitoring (CM) of synthetic fibre ropes (SFRs) used in offshore, maritime, and industrial settings demands more than a classifier: inspectors need continuous severity estimates, maintenance recommendations, anomaly flags, deterioration timelines, and automated reports, all from a single inspection image. We present DART (Damage Assessment via Rope Transformer), a vision-language foundation model that addresses the full rope inspection workflow through a unified multi-task architecture. DART extends the Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) to the cross-modal domain by coupling a Vision Transformer (ViT-H/14) with Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct via a Severity-Conditioned Cross-Modal Fusion (SC-CMF) module. Three architectural innovations drive the model's versatility: (1) HD-MASK, a saliency-guided masking strategy that focuses self-supervised reconstruction on damage-dense patches; (2) per-class learnable severity gates that adaptively weight language grounding by damage category; and (3) a Contrastive Damage Disentanglement (CDD) loss that shapes the embedding space to simultaneously encode damage type, severity ordering, and cross-modal semantics. Trained once on 4,270 images spanning 14 fine-grained rope damage classes, the frozen DART backbone supports downstream tasks without any task-specific fine-tuning: damage classification (93.22 % accuracy, 91.04 % macro-F1, +38.5 pp over a vision-only baseline), continuous severity regression (Spearman rho = 0.94, within-1-ordinal accuracy 99.6 %), few-shot recognition (89.2 % macro-F1 at 20 shots). These results demonstrate that DART functions as a general-purpose CM backbone that goes well beyond classification, providing actionable inspection intelligence from a single shared representation.