Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Esparza, Miguel, Gupta, Archit, Yin, Kai, Xiao, Yiming, Mostafavi, Ali
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01895
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918426903052288
author Esparza, Miguel
Gupta, Archit
Yin, Kai
Xiao, Yiming
Mostafavi, Ali
author_facet Esparza, Miguel
Gupta, Archit
Yin, Kai
Xiao, Yiming
Mostafavi, Ali
contents The escalating intensity and frequency of wildfires demand innovative computational methods for rapid and accurate property damage assessment. Traditional methods are often time-consuming, while modern computer vision approaches typically require extensive labeled datasets, hindering immediate post-disaster deployment. This research introduces a novel, zero-shot framework leveraging pre-trained multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to classify damage from ground-level imagery. Using Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4o (GPT-4o) as the primary model with comparative validation against Qwen2.5-Vision-Language-32-Billion-Instruct (Qwen), the research evaluates two pipelines applied to the 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires in California. These pipelines include an end-to-end inference method (Pipeline A) and a decoupled workflow where visual cues drive text-based classification (Pipeline B). A primary contribution of this study is demonstrating the efficacy of MLLMs in synthesizing information from multiple perspectives. The findings show that while single-view assessments struggle to classify intermediate damage, a multi-view analysis yields dramatic improvements. To explore the impact of prompting methods, the research benchmarked a baseline zero-shot and heuristic approach against advance reasoning strategies (Structured-Chain-of-Thought and Self-Consistency). The results indicate that simple prompting methods achieve a comparable accuracy to the reasoning strategies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_01895
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automated Wildfire Damage Assessment from Multi view Ground level Imagery Via Vision Language Models
Esparza, Miguel
Gupta, Archit
Yin, Kai
Xiao, Yiming
Mostafavi, Ali
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The escalating intensity and frequency of wildfires demand innovative computational methods for rapid and accurate property damage assessment. Traditional methods are often time-consuming, while modern computer vision approaches typically require extensive labeled datasets, hindering immediate post-disaster deployment. This research introduces a novel, zero-shot framework leveraging pre-trained multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to classify damage from ground-level imagery. Using Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4o (GPT-4o) as the primary model with comparative validation against Qwen2.5-Vision-Language-32-Billion-Instruct (Qwen), the research evaluates two pipelines applied to the 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires in California. These pipelines include an end-to-end inference method (Pipeline A) and a decoupled workflow where visual cues drive text-based classification (Pipeline B). A primary contribution of this study is demonstrating the efficacy of MLLMs in synthesizing information from multiple perspectives. The findings show that while single-view assessments struggle to classify intermediate damage, a multi-view analysis yields dramatic improvements. To explore the impact of prompting methods, the research benchmarked a baseline zero-shot and heuristic approach against advance reasoning strategies (Structured-Chain-of-Thought and Self-Consistency). The results indicate that simple prompting methods achieve a comparable accuracy to the reasoning strategies.
title Automated Wildfire Damage Assessment from Multi view Ground level Imagery Via Vision Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01895