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Quick and accurate assessment of the damage state of buildings after natural disasters is crucial for undertaking properly targeted rescue and subsequent recovery operations, which can have a major impact on the safety of victims and the cost of disaster recovery. The quality of such a process can be significantly improved by harnessing the potential of machine learning methods in computer vision. This paper presents a novel damage assessment method using an original multi-step feature fusion network for the classification of the damage state of buildings based on pre- and post-disaster large-scale satellite images. We introduce a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) module that performs feature fusion at multiple network levels between pre- and post-disaster images in the horizontal and vertical directions of CNN network. An additional network element - Fuse Module - was proposed to adapt any CNN model to analyze image pairs in the issue of pair classification. We use, open, large-scale datasets (IDA-BD and xView2) to verify, that the proposed method is suitable to improve on existing state-of-the-art architectures. We report over a 3 percentage point increase in the accuracy of the Vision Transformer model., Comment: 10 pages, for associated Github repository: https://github.com/MatZar01/EQ_vis

World models power some of the most efficient reinforcement learning algorithms. In this work, we showcase that they can be harnessed for continual learning - a situation when the agent faces changing environments. World models typically employ a replay buffer for training, which can be naturally extended to continual learning. We systematically study how different selective experience replay methods affect performance, forgetting, and transfer. We also provide recommendations regarding various modeling options for using world models. The best set of choices is called Continual-Dreamer, it is task-agnostic and utilizes the world model for continual exploration. Continual-Dreamer is sample efficient and outperforms state-of-the-art task-agnostic continual reinforcement learning methods on Minigrid and Minihack benchmarks., Comment: Accepted at CoLLAs 2023, 21 pages, 15 figures

The area affected by the earthquake is vast and often difficult to entirely cover, and the earthquake itself is a sudden event that causes multiple defects simultaneously, that cannot be effectively traced using traditional, manual methods. This article presents an innovative approach to the problem of detecting damage after sudden events by using an interconnected set of deep machine learning models organized in a single pipeline and allowing for easy modification and swapping models seamlessly. Models in the pipeline were trained with a synthetic dataset and were adapted to be further evaluated and used with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in real-world conditions. Thanks to the methods presented in the article, it is possible to obtain high accuracy in detecting buildings defects, segmenting constructions into their components and estimating their technical condition based on a single drone flight., Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, published version, software available from https://github.com/MatZar01/IC_SHM_P2

In recent years, a lot of attention is paid to deep learning methods in the context of vision-based construction site safety systems, especially regarding personal protective equipment. However, despite all this attention, there is still no reliable way to establish the relationship between workers and their hard hats. To answer this problem a combination of deep learning, object detection and head keypoint localization, with simple rule-based reasoning is proposed in this article. In tests, this solution surpassed the previous methods based on the relative bounding box position of different instances, as well as direct detection of hard hat wearers and non-wearers. The results show that the conjunction of novel deep learning methods with humanly-interpretable rule-based systems can result in a solution that is both reliable and can successfully mimic manual, on-site supervision. This work is the next step in the development of fully autonomous construction site safety systems and shows that there is still room for improvement in this area., Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures and 9 tables

Monitoring the technical condition of infrastructure is a crucial element to its maintenance. Currently applied methods are outdated, labour-intensive and inaccurate. At the same time, the latest methods using Artificial Intelligence techniques are severely limited in their application due to two main factors -- labour-intensive gathering of new datasets and high demand for computing power. We propose to utilize custom made framework -- KrakN, to overcome these limiting factors. It enables the development of unique infrastructure defects detectors on digital images, achieving the accuracy of above 90%. The framework supports semi-automatic creation of new datasets and has modest computing power requirements. It is implemented in the form of a ready-to-use software package openly distributed to the public. Thus, it can be used to immediately implement the methods proposed in this paper in the process of infrastructure management by government units, regardless of their financial capabilities., Comment: 23 pages, 15 figures and flowcharts, software available at https://github.com/MatZar01/KrakN, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3764697, and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3755452, dataset available from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3759845