Satellite-to-Street: Synthesizing Post-Disaster Views from Satellite Imagery via Generative Vision Models

Multi-view or video diffusion models have recently emerged as state-of-the-art approaches for novel-view synthesis from sparse image collections. While they can produce high quality images, they tend to hallucinate unrealistic spatial layouts when synthesizing views outside the input views (scene extrapolation). We propose to address this challenge for outdoor scenes by using satellite images as an additional information source to condition the multi-view generative model. We introduce a new satellite-conditioned multi-view diffusion model that combines conditioning from a satellite image and street-level input images when generating novel-views. Our cross-attention based conditioning allows us to retain pretrained multi-view diffusion priors to generate seamless, realistic, novel views from a handful of source views, while also adhering to the scene layout as seen from satellite images. Our model does not use 3D scene reconstruction, and only relies on posed street and satellite views. Our experiments on outdoor datasets show that our model is better than both satellite-conditioned or street-view conditioned baselines on novel-view synthesis, especially on challenging cases where target views have very little overlap with source views. Project page: https://nianticspatial.github.io/groundcontrol

Analyzing street-view imagery with computer vision models offers a promising approach for rapid, hyperlocal disaster damage assessment, but existing approaches typically rely on black-box pre-trained vision models, which lack interpretability and reliability. This study proposes DamageArbiter, a multimodal disagreement-driven arbitration framework designed to improve the accuracy and reliability of street-view-based damage assessment. DamageArbiter leverages the complementary strengths of unimodal and multimodal models and employs a lightweight logistic regression meta-classifier to arbitrate cases in which model predictions disagree. Using 2,556 post-disaster street-view images, paired with manually generated or large language model (LLM)-generated text descriptions, we systematically compared DamageArbiter with fine-tuned unimodal (image-only and text-only) models and CLIP-based multimodal models in terms of classification performance and overconfidence errors. Results show that DamageArbiter improved accuracy to 75.85% and the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) to 0.6188, compared with the best-performing text-only baseline (63.07% accuracy, 0.4126 MCC), image-only baseline (74.33% accuracy, 0.5947 MCC), and CLIP baseline (74.22% accuracy, 0.5915 MCC). The overconfidence analysis further reveals that DamageArbiter substantially reduced the overconfidence error from 70.58% for the best-performing baseline, the image-only ViT model, to 16.45%. Overall, this study demonstrates that accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating disaster damage classification models and highlights the importance of measuring overconfidence errors as part of model reliability assessment. DamageArbiter thus offers a more reliable framework for rapid, hyperlocal disaster damage assessment from street-view imagery.

The scarcity of labeled satellite imagery remains a fundamental bottleneck for deep-learning (DL)-based wildfire monitoring systems. This paper investigates whether a diffusion-based foundation model for Earth Observation (EO), EarthSynth, can synthesize realistic post-wildfire Sentinel-2 RGB imagery conditioned on existing burn masks, without task-specific retraining. Using burn masks derived from the CalFireSeg-50 dataset (Martin et al., 2025), we design and evaluate six controlled experimental configurations that systematically vary: (i) pipeline architecture (mask-only full generation vs. inpainting with pre-fire context), (ii) prompt engineering strategy (three hand-crafted prompts and a VLM-generated prompt via Qwen2-VL), and (iii) a region-wise color-matching post-processing step. Quantitative assessment on 10 stratified test samples uses four complementary metrics: Burn IoU, burn-region color distance (ΔC_burn), Darkness Contrast, and Spectral Plausibility. Results show that inpainting-based pipelines consistently outperform full-tile generation across all metrics, with the structured inpainting prompt achieving the best spatial alignment (Burn IoU = 0.456) and burn saliency (Darkness Contrast = 20.44), while color matching produces the lowest color distance (ΔC_burn = 63.22) at the cost of reduced burn saliency. VLM-assisted inpainting is competitive with hand-crafted prompts. These findings provide a foundation for incorporating generative data augmentation into wildfire detection pipelines. Code and experiments are available at: https://www.kaggle.com/code/valeriamartinh/genai-all-runned