HASTE: A Platform for Rapid Post-Disaster Building Damage Assessment

2026-07-13

AI Summary

This work addresses the critical challenge of rapid building damage mapping in the immediate aftermath of disasters, where paired pre- and post-event imagery and labeled data are typically unavailable. To enable non-AI experts to perform building-level damage assessment using only post-disaster satellite imagery, the authors develop a no-code web platform that innovatively integrates a pretrained vision foundation model, footprint-level feature pooling, and lightweight browser-based semantic segmentation. Leveraging few-shot interactive classification and active learning, the system produces area-wide damage assessments in real time with minimal user annotations. Evaluated on the xBD dataset, the approach achieves performance comparable to fully supervised ResNet-50 with only 1/20 of the annotation effort. Since 2023, the platform has supported over 30 real-world disaster responses, delivering high-temporal-resolution damage maps to humanitarian organizations within hours.

Abstract

When a large disaster strikes, responders need a map of which buildings are damaged within hours. The models that do well on public benchmarks assume matched before-and-after imagery and a training set drawn from similar past events, and neither is usually available for a new disaster in its first day. We present HASTE (High-speed Assessment and Satellite Tracking for Emergencies), a no-code web platform that lets analysts who are not machine learning engineers produce per-building damage maps from post-disaster satellite imagery. HASTE implements two methods that share one interface. The first requires the user to label polygons over the post-disaster scene, trains a small semantic segmentation model on that single scene, runs it over the whole image, and joins the per-pixel output to existing building footprints. The second embeds every footprint with a pretrained vision model, requires the user to label a handful of buildings, and fits a logistic regression in the browser that scores the rest of the scene in seconds. We describe the platform, both methods, and the engineering that supports them. We also report preliminary experiments on xBD showing that foundation-model embeddings pooled over footprints separate damaged from intact buildings using post-disaster imagery alone, matching a fully supervised ResNet-50 baseline with a twentieth of its labels. HASTE and its predecessors have supported more than thirty real-world disaster responses since 2023, spanning earthquakes, hurricanes, cyclones, floods, wildfires, and tornadoes, delivering results to humanitarian partners within hours to days of imagery becoming available. We close with the directions we think are most promising, including vision-language assessment, active learning, and damage models for roads and other infrastructure. HASTE is open source at https://github.com/microsoft/haste.

Problem

• post-disaster damage assessment
• building damage mapping
• satellite imagery
• rapid response
• disaster management

Innovation

• foundation models
• few-shot learning
• post-disaster damage assessment
• no-code platform
• satellite imagery