Crowdsourcing Building Damage Data

Since the early 2000s, crowdsourced analysis of satellite and aerial imagery has been tested as a way to rapidly determine areas with building damage after major disasters. Compared to traditional field-based damage assessments, crowdsourcing initiatives rapidly process extensive data over a large spatial extent and can inform many important emergency response and recovery decisions.

As a collaborative project between the Stanford Urban Resilience Inititative, Heidelberg University, The World Bank, and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, we tested test three approaches to crowdsourcing post-earthquake building damage using 50cm resolution satellite imagery from the 2010 Haiti earthquake. We also interviewed disaster responders about how they might use this information after a disaster.