Survey on Disaster Management Datasets for Remote Sensing Based Emergency Applications

Rapid situational awareness is critical in post-disaster response. While remote sensing damage assessment is evolving from pixel-level change detection to high-level semantic analysis, existing vision-language methodologies still struggle to provide actionable intelligence for complex strategic queries. They remain severely constrained by unimodal optical dependence, a prevailing bias towards natural disasters, and a fundamental lack of grounded interactivity. To address these limitations, we present ChangeQuery, a unified multimodal framework designed for comprehensive, all-weather disaster situation awareness. To overcome modality constraints and scenario biases, we construct the Disaster-Induced Change Query (DICQ) dataset, a large-scale benchmark coupling pre-event optical semantics with post-event SAR structural features across a balanced distribution of natural catastrophes and armed conflicts. Furthermore, to provide the high-quality supervision required for interactive reasoning, we propose a novel Automated Semantic Annotation Pipeline. Adhering to a ``statistics-first, generation-later'' paradigm, this engine automatically transforms raw segmentation masks into grounded, hierarchical instruction sets, effectively equipping the model with fine-grained spatial and quantitative awareness. Trained on this structured data, the ChangeQuery architecture operates as an interactive disaster analyst. It supports multi-task reasoning driven by diverse user queries, delivering precise damage quantification, region-specific descriptions, and holistic post-disaster summaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ChangeQuery establishes a new state-of-the-art, providing a robust and interpretable solution for complex disaster monitoring. The code is available at \href{https://sundongwei.github.io/changequery/}{https://sundongwei.github.io/changequery/}.

Due to the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme climate events, there is a clear demand for intelligent, scalable, and autonomous approaches to disaster damage assessment. Existing methods, largely based on supervised learning and task-specific fine-tuning, struggle to generalize under domain shifts, long-tailed data distributions, and heterogeneous geospatial data sources, especially in disaster scenarios. They also often lack the ability to integrate and reason across multimodal geospatial information, such as satellite images and street-view images. In this paper, we introduce RAPID, a reproducible multi-agent pipeline for interpretable disaster damage assessment, including damage-level assessment, damage-type interpretation, and actionable suggestions for response, remediation, and recovery. RAPID coordinates specialized agents to perform cross-view understanding, image restoration, structured damage recognition, and geographical reasoning across heterogeneous data modalities. Without task-specific fine-tuning, RAPID supports zero-shot damage assessment by jointly using complementary information from remote sensing and ground-level perspectives. The system produces fine-grained, interpretable assessments and automatically generates location-specific, decision-relevant disaster reports to support early-stage emergency response. We evaluate RAPID across hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and earthquakes using multiple cross-view imagery inputs, including pre- and post-disaster street-view images, post-disaster remote sensing imagery, and street-view image pairs. Experiments show that RAPID achieves 0.92 overall accuracy for multi-disaster type classification and up to 0.627 for cross-view damage severity prediction, highlighting its potential as a foundational framework for autonomous disaster intelligence.

Timely and accurate disaster damage assessment is crucial for effective emergency response, resource allocation, and recovery. Traditional methods, which often rely on manual inspections or sparse data, are typically slow and error-prone. This paper introduces a novel framework leveraging remote sensing imagery and deep learning to automate building damage classification. Using pre- and post-disaster satellite imagery, our model categorizes buildings into four damage levels: no damage, minor damage, major damage, and destroyed. The core innovation is a multi-modal attention mechanism that fuses bi-temporal features to explicitly detect and assess structural changes. We employ a lightweight ConvNeXT-Tiny backbone to ensure efficient processing without compromising performance. Key contributions include: (1) a cross-attention module for multi-modal data fusion, (2) an optimized preprocessing pipeline for large-scale datasets, and (3) robust data augmentation techniques. Experiments on a large-scale disaster dataset demonstrate an overall classification accuracy of 94.90%. The model effectively discriminates between damage categories and remains resilient to incomplete data. This system significantly improves assessment speed and accuracy, aiding emergency responders in prioritizing interventions. This work advances automated disaster damage detection by integrating multi-temporal imagery with deep learning, offering a scalable solution for real-time response.