MCANet: A Multi-Scale Class-Specific Attention Network for Multi-Label Post-Hurricane Damage Assessment using UAV Imagery

Rapid and accurate post-hurricane damage assessment is vital for disaster response and recovery. Yet existing CNN-based methods struggle to capture multi-scale spatial features and to distinguish visually similar or co-occurring damage types. To address these issues, we propose MCANet, a multi-label classification framework that learns multi-scale representations and adaptively attends to spatially relevant regions for each damage category. MCANet employs a Res2Net-based hierarchical backbone to enrich spatial context across scales and a multi-head class-specific residual attention module to enhance discrimination. Each attention branch focuses on different spatial granularities, balancing local detail with global context. We evaluate MCANet on the RescueNet dataset of 4,494 UAV images collected after Hurricane Michael. MCANet achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 91.75%, outperforming ResNet, Res2Net, VGG, MobileNet, EfficientNet, and ViT. With eight attention heads, performance further improves to 92.35%, boosting average precision for challenging classes such as Road Blocked by over 6%. Class activation mapping confirms MCANet's ability to localize damage-relevant regions, supporting interpretability. Outputs from MCANet can inform post-disaster risk mapping, emergency routing, and digital twin-based disaster response. Future work could integrate disaster-specific knowledge graphs and multimodal large language models to improve adaptability to unseen disasters and enrich semantic understanding for real-world decision-making.

FloodVision: Urban Flood Depth Estimation Using Foundation Vision-Language Models and Domain Knowledge Graph

Timely and accurate floodwater depth estimation is critical for road accessibility and emergency response. While recent computer vision methods have enabled flood detection, they suffer from both accuracy limitations and poor generalization due to dependence on fixed object detectors and task-specific training. To enable accurate depth estimation that can generalize across diverse flood scenarios, this paper presents FloodVision, a zero-shot framework that combines the semantic reasoning abilities of the foundation vision-language model GPT-4o with a structured domain knowledge graph. The knowledge graph encodes canonical real-world dimensions for common urban objects including vehicles, people, and infrastructure elements to ground the model's reasoning in physical reality. FloodVision dynamically identifies visible reference objects in RGB images, retrieves verified heights from the knowledge graph to mitigate hallucination, estimates submergence ratios, and applies statistical outlier filtering to compute final depth values. Evaluated on 110 crowdsourced images from MyCoast New York, FloodVision achieves a mean absolute error of 8.17 cm, reducing the GPT-4o baseline 10.28 cm by 20.5% and surpassing prior CNN-based methods. The system generalizes well across varying scenes and operates in near real-time, making it suitable for future integration into digital twin platforms and citizen-reporting apps for smart city flood resilience.

Multi-Label Classification Framework for Hurricane Damage Assessment

Hurricanes cause widespread destruction, resulting in diverse damage types and severities that require timely and accurate assessment for effective disaster response. While traditional single-label classification methods fall short of capturing the complexity of post-hurricane damage, this study introduces a novel multi-label classification framework for assessing damage using aerial imagery. The proposed approach integrates a feature extraction module based on ResNet and a class-specific attention mechanism to identify multiple damage types within a single image. Using the Rescuenet dataset from Hurricane Michael, the proposed method achieves a mean average precision of 90.23%, outperforming existing baseline methods. This framework enhances post-hurricane damage assessment, enabling more targeted and efficient disaster response and contributing to future strategies for disaster mitigation and resilience. This paper has been accepted at the ASCE International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering (i3CE 2025), and the camera-ready version will appear in the official conference proceedings.

Short-term Streamflow and Flood Forecasting based on Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network and Residual Error Learning

Accurate short-term streamflow and flood forecasting are critical for mitigating river flood impacts, especially given the increasing climate variability. Machine learning-based streamflow forecasting relies on large streamflow datasets derived from rating curves. Uncertainties in rating curve modeling could introduce errors to the streamflow data and affect the forecasting accuracy. This study proposes a streamflow forecasting method that addresses these data errors, enhancing the accuracy of river flood forecasting and flood modeling, thereby reducing flood-related risk. A convolutional recurrent neural network is used to capture spatiotemporal patterns, coupled with residual error learning and forecasting. The neural network outperforms commonly used forecasting models over 1-6 hours of forecasting horizons, and the residual error learners can further correct the residual errors. This provides a more reliable tool for river flood forecasting and climate adaptation in this critical 1-6 hour time window for flood risk mitigation efforts.