{"ID":2845033,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05461","arxiv_id":"2511.05461","title":"The Potential of Copernicus Satellites for Disaster Response: Retrieving Building Damage from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2","abstract":"Natural disasters demand rapid damage assessment to guide humanitarian response. Here, we investigate whether medium-resolution Earth observation images from the Copernicus program can support building damage assessment, complementing very-high resolution imagery with often limited availability. We introduce xBD-S12, a dataset of 10,315 pre- and post-disaster image pairs from both Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2, spatially and temporally aligned with the established xBD benchmark. In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that building damage can be detected and mapped rather well in many disaster scenarios, despite the moderate 10$\\,$m ground sampling distance. We also find that, for damage mapping at that resolution, architectural sophistication does not seem to bring much advantage: more complex model architectures tend to struggle with generalization to unseen disasters, and geospatial foundation models bring little practical benefit. Our results suggest that Copernicus images are a viable data source for rapid, wide-area damage assessment and could play an important role alongside VHR imagery. We release the xBD-S12 dataset, code, and trained models to support further research at https://github.com/prs-eth/xbd-s12 .","short_abstract":"Natural disasters demand rapid damage assessment to guide humanitarian response. Here, we investigate whether medium-resolution Earth observation images from the Copernicus program can support building damage assessment, complementing very-high resolution imagery with often limited availability. We introduce xBD-S12, a...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05461","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05461v2","authors":"[\"Olivier Dietrich\",\"Merlin Alfredsson\",\"Emilia Arens\",\"Nando Metzger\",\"Torben Peters\",\"Linus Scheibenreif\",\"Jan Dirk Wegner\",\"Konrad Schindler\"]","published":"2025-11-07T18:02:07Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false,"code_links":[{"ID":607342,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_id":2845033,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05461","paper_title":"The Potential of Copernicus Satellites for Disaster Response: Retrieving Building Damage from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2","repo_url":"https://github.com/prs-eth/xbd-s12","is_official":false,"mentioned_in_paper":false,"mentioned_in_github":true,"github_stars":0}]}