Vector-Guided Post-Earthquake Damaged Road Extraction Using Diffusion-Augmented Remote Sensing Imagery

Destructive earthquakes frequently sever transportation lifelines, significantly impeding the progress of emergency rescue and post-disaster reconstruction efforts. The automated identification of road damage utilizing high-resolution remote sensing imagery is strictly constrained by the scarcity of post-disaster labeled samples and the morphological complexity of road networks. Consequently, model segmentation results frequently suffer from discontinuities in topological connectivity and confusion between background features and damaged roads. To address these challenges, this study proposes a road damage detection framework that integrates generative artificial intelligence with vector prior knowledge. A data simulation pipeline utilizing a stable diffusion model was constructed, employing topologically constrained masking to generate high-fidelity synthetic damage samples based on the DeepGlobe dataset, thereby mitigating the data deficit. The proposed Vector-Guided Damaged Road Segmentation Network (VRD-U2Net) employs wavelet convolutions (WTConv) to decouple high-frequency noise from low-frequency structural components and utilizes a Multi-Scale Residual Attention (MSRA) module to align visual features with vector priors. Furthermore, a vector-prior-driven dynamic upsampling mechanism is introduced to enforce geometric constraints on model predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that the method achieves an mIoU of 0.884 on the synthetic dataset. In validation using real-world imagery from the 2023 Turkey earthquake, the model attained an F1-score of 65.3% and recall of 72.3% without fine-tuning, exhibiting robust generalization capabilities to support manual damage assessment in data-scarce emergency scenarios.