HRTBDA: a network for post-disaster building damage assessment based on remote sensing images

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ABSTRACT Efficient building damage assessment after disasters is vital for emergency response and loss evaluation, but the task is complicated by diverse building structures and complex environments. Traditional methods using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) struggle to capture global contextual features, limiting damage categorization accuracy. To address this, we introduce the High-Resolution Transformer Architecture for Building Damage Assessment (HRTBDA), which enhances multi-scale feature extraction. A Cross-Attention-Based Spatial Fusion (CSF) module is proposed to utilize the attention mechanism, improving the model’s ability to identify detailed associations in damaged buildings. Additionally, we propose a deep convolution network matching optimization strategy that integrates a multilayer perceptron and expands the receptive field, enhancing global feature perception. HRTBDA’s performance was evaluated on two public datasets and compared with five recent frameworks. The model achieved an F1-score of 86.0% in building localization and 78.4% in damage assessment, with a 4.8% improvement in detecting minor damages. These results demonstrate HRTBDA’s potential for improving building damage assessment and highlight its significant advancements over existing methods.