Wildfire damage severity census is a crucial activity for estimating monetary losses and for planning a prompt restoration of the affected areas. It consists in assigning, after a wildfire, a numerical damage/severity level, between 0 and 4, to each sub-area of the hit area. While burned area identification has been automatized by means of machine learning algorithms, the wildfire damage severity census operation is usually still performed manually and requires a significant effort of domain experts through the analysis of imagery and, sometimes, on-site missions. In this paper, we propose a novel supervised learning approach for the automatic estimation of the damage/severity level of the hit areas after the wildfire extinction. Specifically, the proposed approach, leveraging on the combination of a classification algorithm and a regression one, predicts the damage/severity level of the sub-areas of the area under analysis by processing a single post-fire satellite acquisition. Our approach has been validated in five different European countries and on 21 wildfires. It has proved to be robust for the application in several geographical contexts presenting similar geological aspects.

Wildfires are one of the natural hazards that the European Union is actively monitoring through the Copernicus EMS Earth observation program which continuously releases public information related to such catastrophic events. Such occurrences are the cause of both short- and long-term damages. Thus, to limit their impact and plan the restoration process, a rapid intervention by authorities is needed, which can be enhanced by the use of satellite imagery and automatic burned area delineation methodologies, accelerating the response and the decision-making processes. In this context, we analyze the burned area severity estimation problem by exploiting a state-of-the-art deep learning framework. Experimental results compare different model architectures and loss functions on a very large real-world Sentinel2 satellite dataset. Furthermore, a novel multi-channel attention-based analysis is presented to uncover the prediction behaviour and provide model interpretability. A perturbation mechanism is applied to an attention-based DS-UNet to evaluate the contribution of different domain-driven groups of channels to the severity estimation problem.

Air pollution in urban regions remains a crucial subject of study, given its implications on health and environment, where much effort is often put into monitoring pollutants and producing accurate trend estimates over time, employing expensive tools and sensors. In this work, we study the problem of air quality estimation in the urban area of Milan (IT), proposing different machine learning approaches that combine meteorological and transit-related features to produce affordable estimates without introducing sensor measurements into the computation. We investigated different configurations employing machine and deep learning models, namely a linear regressor, an Artificial Neural Network using Bayesian regularization, a Random Forest regressor and a Long Short Term Memory network. Our experiments show that affordable estimation results over the pollutants can be achieved even with simpler linear models, therefore suggesting that reasonably accurate Air Quality Index (AQI) measurements can be obtained without the need for expensive equipment.

During natural disasters, situational awareness is needed to understand the situation and respond accordingly. A key need is assessing open roads for transporting emergency support to victims. This can be done via analysis of photos from affected areas with known location. This paper studies the problem of detecting blocked/open roads from photos during floods by applying a two-step approach based on classifiers: does the image have evidence of road? If it does, is the road passable or not? We propose a single double-ended neural network (NN) architecture which addresses both tasks simultaneously. Both problems are treated as a single class classification problem with the use of a compactness loss. The study was performed on a set of tweets, posted during flooding events, that contain (i) metadata and (ii) visual information. We studied the usefulness of each data source and the combination of both. Finally, we conducted a study of the performance gain from ensembling different networks. Through the experimental results, we prove that the proposed double-ended NN makes the model almost two times faster and the load on memory lighter while improving the results with respect to training two separate networks to solve each problem independently.