Transformers for aerial images semantic segmentation of natural disaster-impacted areas in natural disaster assessment

Abstract

Aerial image segmentation of natural disaster-impacted areas and detailed and automatic natural disaster assessment are the main focus of this study. Detecting and recognizing objects on aerial images of areas impacted by natural disasters and assessing natural disaster-impacted areas are still difficult problems. To solve these problems, this study utilizes four of the latest transformer-based semantic segmentation network models, bidirectional encoder representation from image transformers (BEIT), dense prediction transformer (DPT), OneFormer, and SegFormer, and proposes a detailed and automatic natural disaster assessment of the segmented image. The SegFormer model achieved the first-best result, and the OneFormer model achieved the second-best result. The SegFormer model outperformed OneFormer by 1.58% higher for the mean accuracy value and 4.28% for the mean intersection over union (mIoU) value. All receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves have mean area under curve (AUC) values above 0.9, which means that the SegFormer model performs well in generating semantic segmentation images. The fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm performed well and could automatically cluster the natural disaster assessments into four categories. This study has produced semantic segmentation of aerial images of areas impacted by natural disasters and natural disaster assessments, which can be used in natural disaster management systems.

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