# Building Damage Detection using Satellite Images and Patch-Based Transformer Methods

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08117 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08117/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 10 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [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)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [xBD: A Dataset for Assessing Building Damage from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09296/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Damage-TriageFormer: A Foundation-Model Framework for Typology-Based Building Damage Assessment from Mono-Temporal Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12248/) (2026)
- [HASTE: A Platform for Rapid Post-Disaster Building Damage Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11838/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Rapid building damage assessment is critical for post-disaster response. Damage classification models built on satellite imagery provide a scalable means of obtaining situational awareness. However, label noise and severe class imbalance in satellite data create major challenges. The xBD dataset offers a standardized benchmark for building-level damage across diverse geographic regions. In this study, we evaluate Vision Transformer (ViT) model performance on the xBD dataset, specifically investigating how these models distinguish between types of structural damage when training on noisy, imbalanced data. In this study, we specifically evaluate DINOv2-small and DeiT for multi-class damage classification. We propose a targeted patch-based pre-processing pipeline to isolate structural features and minimize background noise in training. We adopt a frozen-head fine-tuning strategy to keep computational requirements manageable. Model performance is evaluated through accuracy, precision, recall, and macro-averaged F1 scores. We show that small ViT architectures with our novel training method achieves competitive macro-averaged F1 relative to prior CNN baselines for disaster classification.