# BDANet: Multiscale Convolutional Neural Network with Cross-directional Attention for Building Damage Assessment from Satellite Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.07364 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07364/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [3D MRI brain tumor segmentation using autoencoder regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11654/) (2018)
- [Fully Convolutional Siamese Networks for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08462/) (2018)
- [xBD: A Dataset for Assessing Building Damage from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09296/) (2019)
- [Data Augmentation using Random Image Cropping and Patching for Deep CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09030/) (2018)
- [Recalibrating Fully Convolutional Networks with Spatial and Channel 'Squeeze & Excitation' Blocks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08127/) (2018)
- [DASNet: Dual attentive fully convolutional siamese networks for change detection of high resolution satellite images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03608/) (2020)
- [Foreground-Aware Relation Network for Geospatial Object Segmentation in High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09766/) (2020)
- [Building Damage Detection in Satellite Imagery Using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06444/) (2019)
- [Building Disaster Damage Assessment in Satellite Imagery with Multi-Temporal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05525/) (2020)
- [MSNet: A Multilevel Instance Segmentation Network for Natural Disaster Damage Assessment in Aerial Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16479/) (2020)
- [RescueNet: Joint Building Segmentation and Damage Assessment from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07312/) (2020)
- [From W-Net to CDGAN: Bi-temporal Change Detection via Deep Learning Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06583/) (2020)
- [An Attention-Based System for Damage Assessment Using Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06643/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [BRIGHT: A globally distributed multimodal building damage assessment dataset with very-high-resolution for all-weather disaster response](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06019/) (2025)
- [Large-scale Building Damage Assessment using a Novel Hierarchical Transformer Architecture on Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02205/) (2022)
- [RescueADI: Adaptive Disaster Interpretation in Remote Sensing Images with Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13384/) (2024)
- [SiamixFormer: a fully-transformer Siamese network with temporal Fusion for accurate building detection and change detection in bi-temporal remote sensing images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00657/) (2022)
- [DamageCAT: A Deep Learning Transformer Framework for Typology-Based Post-Disaster Building Damage Categorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11637/) (2025)
- [FMARS: Annotating Remote Sensing Images for Disaster Management using Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20109/) (2024)
- [Robust Building Damage Detection in Cross-Disaster Settings Using Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14694/) (2026)
- [Learning Efficient Unsupervised Satellite Image-based Building Damage Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01576/) (2023)
- [Recov-Vision: Linking Street View Imagery and Vision-Language Models for Post-Disaster Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20628/) (2025)
- [Predicting Levels of Household Electricity Consumption in Low-Access Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08497/) (2021)
- [Open Access Battle Damage Detection via Pixel-Wise T-Test on Sentinel-1 Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06323/) (2024)
- [Think First, Assign Next (ThiFAN-VQA): A Two-stage Chain-of-Thought Framework for Post-Disaster Damage Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19557/) (2025)
- [Damage-TriageFormer: A Foundation-Model Framework for Typology-Based Building Damage Assessment from Mono-Temporal Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12248/) (2026)
- [Building Damage Assessment in Conflict Zones: A Deep Learning Approach Using Geospatial Sub-Meter Resolution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04802/) (2024)
- [Deeply Dual Supervised learning for melanoma recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01994/) (2025)
- [Edge Detection for Organ Boundaries via Top Down Refinement and SubPixel Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06805/) (2025)
- [DualResolution Residual Architecture with Artifact Suppression for Melanocytic Lesion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06816/) (2025)
- [VesselRW: Weakly Supervised Subcutaneous Vessel Segmentation via Learned Random Walk Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06819/) (2025)
- [Keep Your Friends Close, and the Right Neighbours Closer: Disaster-Conditioned Kernel-Regularized Graph Attention for Building Damage Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20548/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fast and effective responses are required when a natural disaster (e.g., earthquake, hurricane, etc.) strikes. Building damage assessment from satellite imagery is critical before relief effort is deployed. With a pair of pre- and post-disaster satellite images, building damage assessment aims at predicting the extent of damage to buildings. With the powerful ability of feature representation, deep neural networks have been successfully applied to building damage assessment. Most existing works simply concatenate pre- and post-disaster images as input of a deep neural network without considering their correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage convolutional neural network for Building Damage Assessment, called BDANet. In the first stage, a U-Net is used to extract the locations of buildings. Then the network weights from the first stage are shared in the second stage for building damage assessment. In the second stage, a two-branch multi-scale U-Net is employed as backbone, where pre- and post-disaster images are fed into the network separately. A cross-directional attention module is proposed to explore the correlations between pre- and post-disaster images. Moreover, CutMix data augmentation is exploited to tackle the challenge of difficult classes. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on a large-scale dataset -- xBD. The code is available at https://github.com/ShaneShen/BDANet-Building-Damage-Assessment.