Automated identification of building features with deep learning for risk analysis

Accurate and up-to-date information about the building stock is fundamental to better understand and mitigate the impact caused by catastrophic earthquakes, as seen recently in Turkey, Syria, Morocco and Afghanistan. Planning for such events is necessary to increase the resilience of the building stock and to minimize casualties and economic losses. Although in several parts of the world new constructions follow more strict compliance with modern seismic codes, a large proportion of existing building stock still demands a more detailed and automated vulnerability analysis. Hence, this paper proposes the use of computer vision deep learning models to automatically classify buildings and create large scale (city or region) exposure models. Such approach promotes the use of open databases covering most cities in the world (cf. OpenStreetMap, Google Street View, Bing Maps and satellite imagery), Therefore providing valuable geographical, topological and image data that may cheaply be used to extract valuable information to feed exposure models. Our previous work using deep learning models achieved, in line with the results from other projects, high classification accuracy concerning building materials and number of storeys. This paper extends the approach by: (i) implementing four CNN-based models to perform classification of three sets of different/extended buildings’ characteristics; (ii) training and comparing the performance of the four models for each of the sets; (iii) comparing the risk assessment results based on data extracted from the best CNN-based model against the results obtained with traditional ground data. In brief, the best accuracy obtained with the three tested sets of buildings’ characteristics is higher than 80%. Moreover, it is shown that the error resulting from using exposure models fed by automatic classification is not only acceptable, but also far outweighs the time and costs of obtaining a manual and specialised classification of building stocks. Finally, we recognize that automatic assessment of certain complex buildings’ characteristics compares to similar limitations of traditional assessments performed by specialized civil engineers, typically related with the identification of the number of storeys and the construction material. However, the identified limitations do not show worse results when compared against the use of manual buildings’ assessment.