Detection of Collapsed Buildings in Post-Earthquake Remote Sensing Images Based on the Improved YOLOv3

An important and effective method for the preliminary mitigation and relief of an earthquake is the rapid estimation of building damage via high spatial resolution remote sensing technology. Traditional object detection methods only use artificially designed shallow features on post-earthquake remote sensing images, which are uncertain and complex background environment and time-consuming feature selection. The satisfactory results from them are often difficult. Therefore, this study aims to apply the object detection method You Only Look Once (YOLOv3) based on the convolutional neural network (CNN) to locate collapsed buildings from post-earthquake remote sensing images. Moreover, YOLOv3 was improved to obtain more effective detection results. First, we replaced the Darknet53 CNN in YOLOv3 with the lightweight CNN ShuffleNet v2. Second, the prediction box center point, XY loss, and prediction box width and height, WH loss, in the loss function was replaced with the generalized intersection over union (GIoU) loss. Experiments performed using the improved YOLOv3 model, with high spatial resolution aerial remote sensing images at resolutions of 0.5 m after the Yushu and Wenchuan earthquakes, show a significant reduction in the number of parameters, detection speed of up to 29.23 f/s, and target precision of 90.89%. Compared with the general YOLOv3, the detection speed improved by 5.21 f/s and its precision improved by 5.24%. Moreover, the improved model had stronger noise immunity capabilities, which indicates a significant improvement in the model’s generalization. Therefore, this improved YOLOv3 model is effective for the detection of collapsed buildings in post-earthquake high-resolution remote sensing images.