Amateur Drone Videos Could Aid in Natural Disaster Damage Assessment

It wasn't long after Hurricane Laura hit the Gulf Coast Thursday that people began flying drones to record the damage and posting videos on social media. Those videos are a precious resource, say researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, who are working on ways to use them for rapid damage assessment. By using artificial intelligence, the researchers are developing a system that can automatically identify buildings and make an initial determination of whether they are damaged and how serious that damage might be. A team of CMU researchers are using AI to develop a system that automatically identifies buildings in drone footage of natural disasters and determines if they're damaged. The system can identify if the damage is slight (yellow) or serious (orange) or if the building has been destroyed. "Current damage assessments are mostly based on individuals detecting and documenting damage to a building," said Junwei Liang, a Ph.D. candidate in CMU's Language Technologies Institute (LTI).