Smart Transfer: Leveraging Vision Foundation Model for Rapid Building Damage Mapping with Post-Earthquake VHR Imagery

arXiv cs.AI / 4/6/2026

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Key Points

The paper introduces Smart Transfer, a GeoAI framework that uses vision foundation models to rapidly map building damage from post-earthquake VHR satellite imagery.
It addresses poor cross-urban generalization in traditional damage surveys by reducing reliance on exhaustive manual annotation and enabling more robust transfer across different city/region morphologies.
Smart Transfer proposes two transfer strategies—Pixel-wise Clustering (PC) for global prototype feature alignment and Distance-Penalized Triplet (DPT) to enforce patch-level spatial consistency.
Experiments using the 2023 Turkiye-Syria earthquake dataset show strong results in cross-region transfer scenarios such as Leave One Domain Out (LODO) and Specific Source Domain Combination (SSDC).
The authors release the data and code publicly, positioning the approach as a scalable, automated tool to support “Golden 72 Hours” search-and-rescue workflows.

Abstract

Living in a changing climate, human society now faces more frequent and severe natural disasters than ever before. As a consequence, rapid disaster response during the "Golden 72 Hours" of search and rescue becomes a vital humanitarian necessity and community concern. However, traditional disaster damage surveys routinely fail to generalize across distinct urban morphologies and new disaster events. Effective damage mapping typically requires exhaustive and time-consuming manual data annotation. To address this issue, we introduce Smart Transfer, a novel Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) framework, leveraging state-of-the-art vision Foundation Models (FMs) for rapid building damage mapping with post-earthquake Very High Resolution (VHR) imagery. Specifically, we design two novel model transfer strategies: first, Pixel-wise Clustering (PC), ensuring robust prototype-level global feature alignment; second, a Distance-Penalized Triplet (DPT), integrating patch-level spatial autocorrelation patterns by assigning stronger penalties to semantically inconsistent yet spatially adjacent patches. Extensive experiments and ablations from the recent 2023 Turkiye-Syria earthquake show promising performance in multiple cross-region transfer settings, namely Leave One Domain Out (LODO) and Specific Source Domain Combination (SSDC). Moreover, Smart Transfer provides a scalable, automated GeoAI solution to accelerate building damage mapping and support rapid disaster response, offering new opportunities to enhance disaster resilience in climate-vulnerable regions and communities. The data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/ai4city-hkust/SmartTransfer.