{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/learning-efficient-unsupervised-satellite","title":"Learning Efficient Unsupervised Satellite Image-based Building Damage Detection","arxiv_id":"2312.01576","date":"2023-12-04","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yiyun Zhang","Zijian Wang","Yadan Luo","Xin Yu","Zi Huang"],"abstract":"Existing Building Damage Detection (BDD) methods always require labour-intensive pixel-level annotations of buildings and their conditions, hence largely limiting their applications. In this paper, we investigate a challenging yet practical scenario of BDD, Unsupervised Building Damage Detection (U-BDD), where only unlabelled pre- and post-disaster satellite image pairs are provided. As a pilot study, we have first proposed an advanced U-BDD baseline that leverages pre-trained vision-language foundation models (i.e., Grounding DINO, SAM and CLIP) to address the U-BDD task. However, the apparent domain gap between satellite and generic images causes low confidence in the foundation models used to identify buildings and their damages. In response, we further present a novel self-supervised framework, U-BDD++, which improves upon the U-BDD baseline by addressing domain-specific issues associated with satellite imagery. Furthermore, the new Building Proposal Generation (BPG) module and the CLIP-enabled noisy Building Proposal Selection (CLIP-BPS) module in U-BDD++ ensure high-quality self-training. Extensive experiments on the widely used building damage assessment benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for unsupervised building damage detection. The presented annotation-free and foundation model-based paradigm ensures an efficient learning phase. This study opens a new direction for real-world BDD and sets a strong baseline for future research.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.01576v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.01576v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"learning-efficient-unsupervised-satellite","repo_url":"https://github.com/fzmi/ubdd","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"building-damage-assessment","task_name":"Building Damage Assessment"},{"task_slug":"damaged-building-detection","task_name":"Damaged Building Detection"},{"task_slug":"disaster-response","task_name":"Disaster Response"},{"task_slug":"extracting-buildings-in-remote-sensing-images","task_name":"Extracting Buildings In Remote Sensing Images"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"dino","method_name":"DINO"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"sam","method_name":"SAM"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"vision-transformer","method_name":"Vision Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}