# DiRecNetV2: A Transformer-Enhanced Network for Aerial Disaster Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13663 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13663/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (2021)
- [How to train your ViT? Data, Augmentation, and Regularization in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10270/) (2021)
- [ConViT: Improving Vision Transformers with Soft Convolutional Inductive Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10697/) (2021)
- [FloodNet: A High Resolution Aerial Imagery Dataset for Post Flood Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02951/) (2020)
- [Separable Self-attention for Mobile Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02680/) (2022)
- [Global Context Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09959/) (2022)
- [Aerial Imagery Pile burn detection using Deep Learning: the FLAME dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14036/) (2020)
- [Deep-Learning-Based Aerial Image Classification for Emergency Response Applications Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08716/) (2019)
- [MEDIC: A Multi-Task Learning Dataset for Disaster Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12828/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning Benchmarks and Datasets for Social Media Image Classification for Disaster Response](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08916/) (2020)
- [EmergencyNet: Efficient Aerial Image Classification for Drone-Based Emergency Monitoring Using Atrous Convolutional Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14006/) (2021)
- [FireNet: A Specialized Lightweight Fire & Smoke Detection Model for Real-Time IoT Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11922/) (2019)
- [Fast and Accurate Quantized Camera Scene Detection on Smartphones, Mobile AI 2021 Challenge: Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08819/) (2021)
- [From Satellite Imagery to Disaster Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07033/) (2018)
- [Transformer-based Flood Scene Segmentation for Developing Countries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04218/) (2022)
- [Train and Deploy an Image Classifier for Disaster Response](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05495/) (2020)
- [WATT-EffNet: A Lightweight and Accurate Model for Classifying Aerial Disaster Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10811/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [TakuNet: an Energy-Efficient CNN for Real-Time Inference on Embedded UAV systems in Emergency Response Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05880/) (2025)
- [GlimmerNet: A Lightweight Grouped Dilated Depthwise Convolutions for UAV-Based Emergency Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07391/) (2025)
- [Survey on Disaster Management Datasets for Remote Sensing Based Emergency Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08196/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The integration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with artificial intelligence (AI) models for aerial imagery processing in disaster assessment, necessitates models that demonstrate exceptional accuracy, computational efficiency, and real-time processing capabilities. Traditionally Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), demonstrate efficiency in local feature extraction but are limited by their potential for global context interpretation. On the other hand, Vision Transformers (ViTs) show promise for improved global context interpretation through the use of attention mechanisms, although they still remain underinvestigated in UAV-based disaster response applications. Bridging this research gap, we introduce DiRecNetV2, an improved hybrid model that utilizes convolutional and transformer layers. It merges the inductive biases of CNNs for robust feature extraction with the global context understanding of Transformers, maintaining a low computational load ideal for UAV applications. Additionally, we introduce a new, compact multi-label dataset of disasters, to set an initial benchmark for future research, exploring how models trained on single-label data perform in a multi-label test set. The study assesses lightweight CNNs and ViTs on the AIDERSv2 dataset, based on the frames per second (FPS) for efficiency and the weighted F1 scores for classification performance. DiRecNetV2 not only achieves a weighted F1 score of 0.964 on a single-label test set but also demonstrates adaptability, with a score of 0.614 on a complex multi-label test set, while functioning at 176.13 FPS on the Nvidia Orin Jetson device.