AIFloodSense: A Global Aerial Imagery Dataset for Semantic Segmentation and Understanding of Flooded Environments

TL;DR

AIFloodSense is a large, diverse aerial imagery dataset designed to improve flood detection and understanding through multiple tasks like classification, segmentation, and VQA, supporting climate resilience research.

Contribution

The paper introduces AIFloodSense, a comprehensive global flood dataset with multi-task annotations, addressing previous limitations in geographic diversity and annotation detail.

Findings

Established baseline benchmarks for all tasks.

Demonstrated dataset's complexity and utility.

Supported development of domain-generalized AI tools.

Abstract

Accurate flood detection from visual data is a critical step toward improving disaster response and risk assessment, yet datasets for flood segmentation remain scarce due to the challenges of collecting and annotating large-scale imagery. Existing resources are often limited in geographic scope and annotation detail, hindering the development of robust, generalized computer vision methods. To bridge this gap, we introduce AIFloodSense, a comprehensive, publicly available aerial imagery dataset comprising 470 high-resolution images from 230 distinct flood events across 64 countries and six continents. Unlike prior benchmarks, AIFloodSense ensures global diversity and temporal relevance (2022-2024), supporting three complementary tasks: (i) Image Classification with novel sub-tasks for environment type, camera angle, and continent recognition; (ii) Semantic Segmentation providing precise pixel-level masks for flood, sky, and buildings; and (iii) Visual Question Answering (VQA) to enable natural language reasoning for disaster assessment. We establish baseline benchmarks for all tasks using state-of-the-art architectures, demonstrating the dataset's complexity and its value in advancing domain-generalized AI tools for climate resilience.