Detecting Natural Disasters, Damage, and Incidents in the Wild

Ethan Weber*, Nuria Marzo, Dim P. Papadopoulos, Aritro Biswas, Agata Lapedriza, Ferda Ofli, Muhammad Imran, Antonio Torralba

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

38 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Responding to natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, and wildfires, is a laborious task performed by on-the-ground emergency responders and analysts. Social media has emerged as a low-latency data source to quickly understand disaster situations. While most studies on social media are limited to text, images offer more information for understanding disaster and incident scenes. However, no large-scale image datasets for incident detection exists. In this work, we present the Incidents Dataset, which contains 446,684 images annotated by humans that cover 43 incidents across a variety of scenes. We employ a baseline classification model that mitigates false-positive errors and we perform image filtering experiments on millions of social media images from Flickr and Twitter. Through these experiments, we show how the Incidents Dataset can be used to detect images with incidents in the wild. Code, data, and models are available online at http://incidentsdataset.csail.mit.edu.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationComputer Vision – ECCV 2020 - 16th European Conference, 2020, Proceedings
EditorsAndrea Vedaldi, Horst Bischof, Thomas Brox, Jan-Michael Frahm
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages331-350
Number of pages20
ISBN (Print)9783030585280
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Event16th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2020 - Glasgow, United Kingdom
Duration: 23 Aug 202028 Aug 2020

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12364 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference16th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityGlasgow
Period23/08/2028/08/20

Keywords

  • Disaster analysis
  • Image classification
  • Image dataset
  • Incident detection
  • Scene understanding
  • Social media
  • Visual recognition

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