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A timely and accurate damage assessment of buildings after an earthquake is critical for the safety of people and property. Most of the existing methods based on classification and segmentation use two-dimensional information to determine the damage level of the buildings, which cannot provide the multi-view information of the damaged building, resulting in inaccurate assessment results. According to the knowledge of the authors, there is no related research using the deep-learning-based 3D reconstruction method for the evaluation of building damage. In this paper, we first applied the deep-learning-based MVS model to reconstruct the 3D model of the buildings after an earthquake using multi-view UAV images, to assist the building damage assessment task. The method contains three main steps. Firstly, the camera parameters are calculated. Then, 3D reconstruction is conducted based on CasMVSNet. Finally, a building damage assessment is performed based on the 3D reconstruction result. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the method was tested in multi-view UAV aerial images of Yangbi County, Yunnan Province. The results indicate that: (1) the time efficiency of CasMVSNet is significantly higher than that of other deep learning models, which can meet the timeliness requirement of post-earthquake rescue and damage assessment. In addition, the memory consumption of CasMVSNet is the lowest; (2) CasMVSNet exhibits the best 3D reconstruction result in both high and small buildings; (3) the proposed method can provide detail and multi-view information of damaged buildings, which can be used to assist the building damage assessment task. The results of the building damage assessment are very similar to the results of the field survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accurate and timely identification of the degree of building damage is critical for disaster emergency response and loss assessment. Although many methods have been proposed, most of them divide damaged buildings into two categories—intact and damaged—which is insufficient to meet practical needs. To address this issue, we present a novel convolutional neural network—namely, the earthquake building damage classification net (EBDC-Net)—for assessment of building damage based on post-disaster aerial images. The proposed network comprises two components: a feature extraction encoder module, and a damage classification module. The feature extraction encoder module is employed to extract semantic information on building damage and enhance the ability to distinguish between different damage levels, while the classification module improves accuracy by combining global and contextual features. The performance of EBDC-Net was evaluated using a public dataset, and a large-scale damage assessment was performed using a dataset of post-earthquake unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images. The results of the experiments indicate that this approach can accurately classify buildings with different damage levels. The overall classification accuracy was 94.44%, 85.53%, and 77.49% when the damage to the buildings was divided into two, three, and four categories, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]