DisasterGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Remote Sensing Disaster Image Generation

Rapid progress on disaster detection and assessment has been achieved with the development of deep-learning techniques and the wide applications of remote sensing images. However, it is still a great challenge to train an accurate and robust disaster detection network due to the class imbalance of existing data sets and the lack of training data. This paper aims at synthesizing disaster remote sensing images with multiple disaster types and different building damage with generative adversarial networks (GANs), making up for the shortcomings of the existing data sets. However, existing models are inefficient in multi-disaster image translation due to the diversity of disaster and inevitably change building-irrelevant regions caused by directly operating on the whole image. Thus, we propose two models: disaster translation GAN can generate disaster images for multiple disaster types using only a single model, which uses an attribute to represent disaster types and a reconstruction process to further ensure the effect of the generator; damaged building generation GAN is a mask-guided image generation model, which can only alter the attribute-specific region while keeping the attribute-irrelevant region unchanged. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the validity of the proposed methods. Further experimental results on the damaged building assessment model show the effectiveness of the proposed models and the superiority compared with other data augmentation methods.