AI and Generative AI Transforming Disaster Management: A Survey of Damage Assessment and Response Techniques

TL;DR

This survey explores how AI and Generative AI are revolutionizing disaster damage assessment and response, highlighting current applications, challenges, ethical issues, and future research directions in natural disaster management.

Contribution

It is the first comprehensive review of Generative AI techniques applied to disaster assessment and response, covering multimodal data, limitations, and ethical considerations.

Findings

AI and GenAI enhance damage assessment speed and accuracy.

Challenges include data privacy, security, and misinformation risks.

Future research emphasizes secure, ethical, and reliable AI systems.

Abstract

Natural disasters, including earthquakes, wildfires and cyclones, bear a huge risk on human lives as well as infrastructure assets. An effective response to disaster depends on the ability to rapidly and efficiently assess the intensity of damage. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) presents a breakthrough solution, capable of combining knowledge from multiple types and sources of data, simulating realistic scenarios of disaster, and identifying emerging trends at a speed previously unimaginable. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review on the prospects of AI and GenAI in damage assessment for various natural disasters, highlighting both its strengths and limitations. We talk about its application to multimodal data such as text, image, video, and audio, and also cover major issues of data privacy, security, and ethical use of the technology during crises. The paper also recognizes the threat of Generative AI misuse, in the form of dissemination of misinformation and for adversarial attacks. Finally, we outline avenues of future research, emphasizing the need for secure, reliable, and ethical Generative AI systems for disaster management in general. We believe that this work represents the first comprehensive survey of Gen-AI techniques being used in the field of Disaster Assessment and Response.