DA-SegFormer: Damage-Aware Semantic Segmentation for Fine-Grained Disaster Assessment

Rapid and accurate damage assessment following natural disasters is critical for effective emergency response. However, identifying fine-grained damage levels (e.g., distinguishing minor from major roof damage) in UAV imagery remains challenging due to the degradation of texture cues during resizing and extreme class imbalance. We propose DA-SegFormer, a damage-aware adaptation of the SegFormer architecture optimized for high-resolution disaster imagery. Our method introduces a Class-Aware Sampling strategy to guarantee exposure to rare damage features, and it integrates Online Hard Example Mining (OHEM) with Dice Loss to dynamically focus on underrepresented classes. In addition, we employ a resolution-preserving inference protocol that maintains native texture details. Evaluated on the RescueNet dataset, DA-SegFormer achieves 74.61\% mIoU, outperforming the baseline by 2.55\%. Notably, our improvements yield double-digit gains in critical damage classes: Minor Damage (+11.7%) and Major Damage (+21.3%).

3D Semantic Segmentation for Post-Disaster Assessment

The increasing frequency of natural disasters poses severe threats to human lives and leads to substantial economic losses. While 3D semantic segmentation is crucial for post-disaster assessment, existing deep learning models lack datasets specifically designed for post-disaster environments. To address this gap, we constructed a specialized 3D dataset using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-captured aerial footage of Hurricane Ian (2022) over affected areas, employing Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and Multi-View Stereo (MVS) techniques to reconstruct 3D point clouds. We evaluated the state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D semantic segmentation models, Fast Point Transformer (FPT), Point Transformer v3 (PTv3), and OA-CNNs on this dataset, exposing significant limitations in existing methods for disaster-stricken regions. These findings underscore the urgent need for advancements in 3D segmentation techniques and the development of specialized 3D benchmark datasets to improve post-disaster scene understanding and response.