Image4Act: Online Social Media Image Processing for Disaster Response

We present an end-to-end social media image processing system called Image4Act. The system aims at collecting, denoising, and classifying imagery content posted on social media platforms to help humanitarian organizations in gaining situational awareness and launching relief operations. It combines human computation and machine learning techniques to process high-volume social media imagery content in real time during natural and human-made disasters. To cope with the noisy nature of the social media imagery data, we use a deep neural network and perceptual hashing techniques to filter out irrelevant and duplicate images. Furthermore, we present a specific use case to assess the severity of infrastructure damage incurred by a disaster. The evaluations of the system on existing disaster datasets as well as a real-world deployment during a recent cyclone prove the effectiveness of the system.