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After the occurrence of a hurricane, assessing damage is extremely important for the emergency managers so that relief aid could be provided to afflicted people. One method of assessing the damage is to determine the damaged and the undamaged buildings post-hurricane. Normally, damage assessment is performed by conducting ground surveys, which are time-consuming and involve immense effort. In this paper, transfer learning techniques have been used for determining damaged and undamaged buildings in post-hurricane satellite images. Four different transfer learning techniques, which include VGG16, MobileNetV2, InceptionV3 and DenseNet121, have been applied to 23,000 Hurricane Harvey satellite images, which occurred in the Texas region. A comparative analysis of these models has been performed on the basis of the number of epochs and the optimizers used. The performance of the VGG16 pre-trained model was better than the other models and achieved an accuracy of 0.75, precision of 0.74, recall of 0.95 and F1-score of 0.83 when the Adam optimizer was used. When the comparison of the best performing models was performed in terms of various optimizers, VGG16 produced the best accuracy of 0.78 for the RMSprop optimizer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hurricanes are one of the most disastrous natural phenomena occurring on Earth that cause loss of human lives and immense damage to property. A damage assessment method has been proposed for damage caused to buildings due to Hurricane Harvey that hit the Texas region in the year 2017. The aim of our study is to predict if there is any damage to the buildings present in the postdisaster satellite images. Principal component analysis has been used for the visualization of data. The VGG16 model has been used for extracting features from the input images. K-nearest neighbor (KNN), logistic regression, decision tree, random forest, and XGBoost classification techniques have been used for classification of the images whose features have been extracted from VGG16. Best accuracy of 97% is obtained by KNN classifier for the balanced test set, and accuracy of 96% is obtained by logistic regression for the unbalanced test set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]