VLCE: A Knowledge-Enhanced Framework for Image Description in Disaster Assessment

General-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) such as LLaVA and QwenVL produce descriptions of disaster imagery that lack domain-specific vocabulary and actionable detail. We propose the Vision-Language Caption Enhancer (VLCE), a framework that integrates external semantic knowledge from ConceptNet and WordNet into the caption generation process for post-disaster satellite and UAV imagery. VLCE operates in two stages: first, a baseline VLM generates an initial caption conditioned on YOLOv8 object detections; second, a knowledge-enriched sequential model, a CNN-LSTM or a hierarchical cross-modal Transformer, refines the caption using a vocabulary augmented with 1,566 domain-relevant terms extracted from knowledge graphs. We evaluate VLCE on two disaster benchmarks: xBD (satellite, 6,369 images, 3 damage classes) and RescueNet (UAV, 4,494 images, 12 damage classes), using CLIPScore for semantic alignment and InfoMetIC for informativeness. On RescueNet with the Transformer decoder, VLCE with knowledge graph enrichment produces captions preferred over QwenVL baselines in 95.33% of image pairs on InfoMetIC and 73.64% on CLIPScore. Qualitative analysis shows that without knowledge graph integration, generated captions exhibit hallucinations, word repetition, and semantic incoherence, whereas knowledge-enriched captions maintain factual consistency and domain-appropriate vocabulary.