Kumar, PakheeOfli, FerdaImran, MuhammadCastillo, Carlos2021-02-052021-02-052020Kumar P, Ofli F, Imran M, Castillo C. Detection of disaster-affected cultural heritage sites from social media images using deep learning techniques. J Comput Cult Herit. 2020 Aug;13(3):23. DOI: 10.1145/33833141556-4673http://hdl.handle.net/10230/46354This article describes a method for early detection of disaster-related damage to cultural heritage. It is based on data from social media, a timely and large-scale data source that is nevertheless quite noisy. First, we collect images posted on social media that may refer to a cultural heritage site. Then, we automatically categorize these images according to two dimensions: whether they are indeed a photo in which a cultural heritage resource is the main subject, and whether they represent damage. Both categorizations are challenging image classification tasks, given the ambiguity of these visual categories; we tackle both tasks using a convolutional neural network. We test our methodology on a large collection of thousands of images from the web and social media, which exhibit the diversity and noise that is typical of these sources, and contain buildings and other architectural elements, heritage and not-heritage, damaged by disasters as well as intact. Our results show that while the automatic classification is not perfect, it can greatly reduce the manual effort required to find photos of damaged cultural heritage by accurately detecting relevant candidates to be examined by a cultural heritage professional.application/pdfeng© ACM, 2020. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in J Comput Cult Herit, 2020 Aug;13(3):23 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3383314info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3383314Cultural heritage sitesSocial mediaDamage assessmentDeep learninginfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess