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Increasing the Reliability of Aerial Imagery Analysis for Damage Assessments

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In March 2015, I was invited by the World Bank to spearhead an ambitious humanitarian aerial robotics (UAV) mission to Vanuatu following Cyclone Pam, a devastating Category 5 Cyclone. This mission was coordinated with Heliwest and X-Craft, two outstanding UAV companies who were identified through the Humanitarian UAV Network (UAViators) Roster of Pilots. You can learn more about the mission and see pictures here. Lessons learned from this mission (and many others) are available here.

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The World Bank and partners were unable to immediately analyze the aerial imagery we had collected because they faced a Big Data challenge. So I suggested the Bank activate the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) to request digital volunteer assistance. As a result, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap (HOT) analyzed some of the orthorectified mosaics and MicroMappers focused on analyzing the oblique images (more on both here).

This in turn produced a number of challenges. To cite just one, the Bank needed digital humanitarians to identify which houses or buildings were completely destroyed, versus partially damaged versus largely intact. But there was little guidance on how to determine what constituted fully destroyed versus partially damaged or what such structures in Vanuatu look like when damaged by a Cyclone. As a result, data quality was not as high as it could have been. In my capacity as consultant for the World Bank’s UAVs for Resilience Program, I decided to do something about this lack of guidelines for imagery interpretation.

I turned to my colleagues at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (where I had previously co-founded and co-directed the HHI Program on Crisis Mapping) and invited them to develop a rigorous guide that could inform the consistent interpretation of aerial imagery of disaster damage in Vanuatu (and nearby Island States). Note that Vanuatu is number one on the World Bank’s Risk Index of most disaster-prone countries. The imagery analysis guide has just published (PDF) by the Signal Program on Human Security and Technology at HHI.

Big thanks to the HHI team for having worked on this guide and for my Bank colleagues and other reviewers for their detailed feedback on earlier drafts. The guide is another important step towards improving data quality for satellite and aerial imagery analysis in the context of damage assessments. Better data quality is also important for the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and computer vision as explained here. If a humanitarian UAV mission does happen in response to the recent disaster in Fiji, then the guide may also be of assistance there depending on how similar the building materials and architecture is. For now, many thanks to HHI for having produced this imagery guide.



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