A Novel Weighted Ensemble Transferred U-Net Based Model (WETUM) for Postearthquake Building Damage Assessment From UAV Data: A Comparison of Deep Learning- and Machine Learning-Based Approaches

Nowadays, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing data are key operational sources used to produce a reliable building damage map (BDM), which is of great importance in instant response and rescue operations after earthquakes. The present study proposes a novel weighted ensemble transferred U-Net-based model (WETUM) consisting of two major steps to create a reliable binary BDM using UAV data. In the first step of the proposed approach, three individual initial BDMs are predicted by three pre-trained U-Net-based composite networks. In the second step, these three individual predictions are linearly integrated through a proposed grid search technique so that an optimized hybrid BDM (OHBDM) incorporating complementary damage information is made. The proposed WETUM was then compared with several conventional deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) models. The models were compared across two pivotal scenarios, addressing the impact of diverse feature sets on model performance and generalizability. Specifically, the first scenario focused solely on spectral features, while the second incorporated both spectral and geometrical features. To make the comparisons, this study conducted empirical analyses using UAV spectral and geometrical data acquired over Sarpol-e Zahab, Iran. The experimental findings showed that the synergic use of spectral and geometrical data boosted both DL- and ML-based approaches in damage detection. Moreover, the proposed WETUM with DDR values of 65.22 and 78.26 (%), respectively, for the first and second scenarios, outperformed all the compared methods. Notably, WETUM with only spectral data outperformed the random forest (RF) classifier equipped with many hand-crafted spectral and geometrical features, indicating the highest potential and generalizability of the proposed WETUM for building damage evaluation in a new unseen earthquake-affected area.