EIDSeg: A Pixel-Level Semantic Segmentation Dataset for Post-Earthquake Damage Assessment from Social Media Images

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Authors: Association for Artificial Intelligence 2026, Parisa Babolhavaeji, J. David Frost, Huili Huang, Chengeng Liu, WeiHong Low, Anastasiya Masalava, Shail Patel, Max Mahdi Roozbahani, Sagar Sadak, Danrong Zhang
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Abstract

Rapid post‑earthquake damage assessment is crucial for rescue and resource planning. Still, existing remote sensing methods depend on costly aerial images, expert labeling, and produce only binary damage maps for early-stage evaluation. Although ground-level images from social networks provide a valuable source to fill this gap, a large pixel-level annotated dataset for this task is still unavailable. We introduce EIDSeg, the first large-scale semantic segmentation dataset specifically for post-earthquake social media imagery. The dataset comprises 3,266 images from nine major earthquakes (2008–2023), annotated across five classes of infrastructure damage: Undamaged Building, Damaged Building, Destroyed Building, Undamaged Road, and Damaged Road. We propose a practical three-phase cross-disciplinary annotation protocol with labeling guidelines that enables consistent segmentation by non-expert annotators, achieving over 70% inter-annotator agreement. We benchmark several state-of-the-art segmentation models, identifying Encoder-only Mask Transformer (EoMT) as the top-performing method with a Mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 80.8%. By unlocking social networks' rich, ground-level perspective, our work paves the way for a faster, finer-grained damage assessment in the post-earthquake scenario. All data and code will be released upon acceptance of the paper.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Infrastructure Maintenance and Monitoring Remote-Sensing Image Classification Advanced Neural Network Applications

Publication details

Journal / source
Underline Science Inc.
Publication date
7 January 2026
Language
EN