ALTIS: Automated Loss Triage and Impact Scoring from Sentinel-1 SAR for Property-Level Flood Damage Assessment

TL;DR

ALTIS is a novel pipeline that rapidly transforms Sentinel-1 SAR data into property-level flood impact scores within 48 hours, improving insurance triage efficiency and reducing unnecessary claims inspections.

Contribution

This work introduces ALTIS, the first pipeline to produce property-level impact scores from SAR data tailored for insurance workflows, with new metrics like IRR and TES.

Findings

Potentially reduces over half of unnecessary claims dispatches.

Achieves approximately 0.52 IRR at 90% high-severity claim recall.

Provides a methodological baseline for insurance-oriented earth observation analysis.

Abstract

Floods are among the costliest natural catastrophes globally, yet the property and casualty insurance industry's post-event response remains heavily reliant on manual field inspection: slow, expensive, and geographically constrained. Satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) offers cloud-penetrating, all-weather imaging uniquely suited to rapid post-flood assessment, but existing research evaluates SAR flood detection against academic benchmarks such as IoU and F1-score that do not capture insurance-workflow requirements. We present ALTIS: a five-stage pipeline transforming raw Sentinel-1 GRD and SLC imagery into property-level impact scores within 24-48 hours of flood peak. Unlike prior approaches producing pixel-level maps or binary outputs, ALTIS delivers a ranked, confidence-scored triage list consumable by claims platforms, integrating (i) multi-temporal SAR change detection using dual-polarization VV/VH intensity and InSAR coherence, (ii) physics-informed depth estimation fusing flood extent with high-resolution DEMs, (iii) property-level zonal statistics from parcel footprints, (iv) depth-damage calibration against NFIP claims, and (v) confidence-scored triage ranking. We formally define Insurance-Grade Flood Triage (IGFT) and introduce the Inspection Reduction Rate (IRR) and Triage Efficiency Score (TES). Using Hurricane Harvey (2017) across Harris County, Texas, we present preliminary analysis grounded in validated sub-components suggesting ALTIS is designed to achieve an IRR of approximately 0.52 at 90% recall of high-severity claims, potentially eliminating over half of unnecessary dispatches. By blending SAR flood intelligence with the realities of claims management, ALTIS establishes a methodological baseline for translating earth observation research into measurable insurance outcomes.