InCR: Inception and concatenation residual block-based deep learning network for damaged building detection using remote sensing images

In February 2023, Turkey experienced a series of earthquakes that caused significant damage to buildings and affected many people. Detecting building damage quickly is crucial for helping earthquake victims, and we believe machine learning models offer a promising solution. In our research, we introduce a new, lightweight deep-learning model capable of accurately classifying damaged buildings in remote-sensing datasets. Our main goal is to create an automated damage detection system using a novel deep-learning model. We started by collecting a new dataset with two categories: damaged and undamaged buildings. Then, we developed a unique convolutional neural network (CNN) called the inception and concatenation residual (InCR) deep learning network, which incorporates concatenation-based residual blocks and inception blocks to improve performance. We trained our InCR model on the newly collected dataset and used it to extract features from images using global average pooling. To refine these features and select the most informative ones, we applied iterative neighborhood component analysis (INCA). Finally, we classified the refined features using commonly used shallow classifiers. To evaluate our method, we used tenfold cross-validation (10-fold CV) with eight classifiers. The results showed that all classifiers achieved classification accuracies higher than 98 %. This demonstrates that our proposed InCR model is a viable option for CNNs and can be used to create an accurate automated damage detection application. Our research presents a unique solution to the challenge of automated damage detection after earthquakes, showing promising results that highlight the potential of our approach.