{"id":{"repo_id":"vt","oai_identifier":"oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/110429"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/vt/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/110429","repository":{"repo_id":"vt","name":"Virginia Tech","base_url":"https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request"},"display":{"title":"Estimate Flood Damage Using Satellite Images and Twitter Data","abstract":"Recently it is obvious that climate change has became a critical topic for human society. As climate change becomes more severe, natural disasters caused by climate change have increasingly impacted humans. Most recently, Hurricane Ida killed 43 people across four states. Hurricane Ida's damage could top $95 billion, and many meteorologists predict that climate change is making storms wetter and wider. Thus, there is an urgent need to predict how much damage the flood will cause and prepare for possible destruction. Most current flood damage estimation system did not apply social media data. The theme of this thesis was to evaluate the feasibility of using machine learning models to predict hurricane damage and the input data are social media and satellite imagery. This work involves developing Data Mining approach and a couple of different Machine Learning models that further extract the feature from the data. Satellite imagery is used to identify changes in building structures as well as landscapes, and Twitter data is used to identify damaged locations and the severity of the damage. The features of Twitter posts and satellite imagery were extracted through pre-trained GloVe, ResNet, and VGG models separately. The embedding features were then fed to MLP models for damage level estimation. The models were trained and evaluated on the data. Finally, a case study was performed on the test dataset for hints on improving the models.","abstract_html":"Recently it is obvious that climate change has became a critical topic for human society. As climate change becomes more severe, natural disasters caused by climate change have increasingly impacted humans. Most recently, Hurricane Ida killed 43 people across four states. Hurricane Ida's damage could top $95 billion, and many meteorologists predict that climate change is making storms wetter and wider. Thus, there is an urgent need to predict how much damage the flood will cause and prepare for possible destruction. Most current flood damage estimation system did not apply social media data. The theme of this thesis was to evaluate the feasibility of using machine learning models to predict hurricane damage and the input data are social media and satellite imagery. This work involves developing Data Mining approach and a couple of different Machine Learning models that further extract the feature from the data. Satellite imagery is used to identify changes in building structures as well as landscapes, and Twitter data is used to identify damaged locations and the severity of the damage. The features of Twitter posts and satellite imagery were extracted through pre-trained GloVe, ResNet, and VGG models separately. The embedding features were then fed to MLP models for damage level estimation. The models were trained and evaluated on the data. Finally, a case study was performed on the test dataset for hints on improving the models.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Sun, Stephen Wei-Hao"],"institution":"Virginia Tech","degree_name":"Master of Science","degree_level":"masters","degree_discipline":"Computer Science and Applications","degree_department":"Computer Science","school":null,"contributors":[],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":["Lu, Chang Tien"],"committee_members":["Cho, Jin-Hee","Luther, Kurt"],"year":2022,"date_issued":"2022-06-03","date_published":"2022-06-03","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:20:26Z","subjects":["Data Mining","Social Media","Twitter","Spatial Data Management"],"languages":["en"],"rights":["In Copyright"],"rights_urls":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"identifier_entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier.other","label":"Dc Identifier Other","values":["vt_gsexam:35228"],"render_values":[{"text":"vt_gsexam:35228","href":null,"code":true}]}]},"links":{"outbound_url":"http://hdl.handle.net/10919/110429","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier.uri"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor.committeechair","label":"Committee Chair","values":["Lu, Chang Tien"]},{"key":"dc:contributor.committeemember","label":"Committee Member","values":["Cho, Jin-Hee","Luther, Kurt"]},{"key":"dc:contributor.department","label":"Department","values":["Computer Science"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Sun, Stephen Wei-Hao"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date.accessioned","label":"Dc Date Accessioned","values":["2022-06-04T08:00:42Z"]},{"key":"dc:date.available","label":"Dc Date Available","values":["2022-06-04T08:00:42Z"]},{"key":"dc:date.issued","label":"Date","values":["2022-06-03"]},{"key":"dc:publisher","label":"Institution","values":["Virginia Tech"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["Thesis"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_discipline","label":"Discipline","values":["Computer Science and Applications"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_level","label":"Degree Level","values":["masters"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_name","label":"Degree Name","values":["Master of Science"]},{"key":"thesis:institution_name","label":"Thesis Institution Name","values":["Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["Data Mining","Social Media","Twitter","Spatial Data Management"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language.iso","label":"Language (ISO)","values":["en"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["In Copyright"]},{"key":"dc:rights.uri","label":"Rights URI","values":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier.other","label":"Dc Identifier Other","values":["vt_gsexam:35228"]},{"key":"dc:identifier.uri","label":"Identifier URI","values":["http://hdl.handle.net/10919/110429"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description.abstract","label":"Abstract","values":["Recently it is obvious that climate change has became a critical topic for human society. As climate change becomes more severe, natural disasters caused by climate change have increasingly impacted humans. Most recently, Hurricane Ida killed 43 people across four states. Hurricane Ida's damage could top $95 billion, and many meteorologists predict that climate change is making storms wetter and wider. Thus, there is an urgent need to predict how much damage the flood will cause and prepare for possible destruction. Most current flood damage estimation system did not apply social media data. The theme of this thesis was to evaluate the feasibility of using machine learning models to predict hurricane damage and the input data are social media and satellite imagery. This work involves developing Data Mining approach and a couple of different Machine Learning models that further extract the feature from the data. Satellite imagery is used to identify changes in building structures as well as landscapes, and Twitter data is used to identify damaged locations and the severity of the damage. The features of Twitter posts and satellite imagery were extracted through pre-trained GloVe, ResNet, and VGG models separately. The embedding features were then fed to MLP models for damage level estimation. The models were trained and evaluated on the data. Finally, a case study was performed on the test dataset for hints on improving the models."]},{"key":"dc:description.abstractgeneral","label":"General Abstract","values":["Natural disasters affect Millions of people's lives each year and it is becoming even more severe because of global warming. To make rescue more efficient when the roads and bridges are cut, social media and satellite imagery are effective data sources to help estimating flood damage. With the growth of social media, it is obvious that the post and information from people on the Internet are powerful. Also, with image processing technology improves, the information extracted from satellite images is crucial. In this work we have developed a data mining approach along with different combinations of pre-trained models using neural networks, satellite imagery and archived data from Twitter to estimate flood damage. The data mining approach leverages keywords to identify the event in the history posts in the Twitter, more specifically, we attain the geo-location, time, language information from Twitter, also using pre-event and post-event images which satellite took to generate vectors and thus effectively acquire very useful embedding features. With vectored information from Twitter and satellite imagery, we use pre-trained models and generate damage level prediction. The final results suggest that the proposed approach has potential to create more accurate prediction by using multiple data as input. Furthermore, the estimate result by using only satellite images even outperformed the result using Twitter information, which is an unexpected result comparing to previous studies."]},{"key":"dc:description.degree","label":"Dc Description Degree","values":["Master of Science"]},{"key":"dc:format.medium","label":"Dc Format Medium","values":["ETD"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["Estimate Flood Damage Using Satellite Images and Twitter Data"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor.committeechair":["Lu, Chang Tien"],"dc:contributor.committeemember":["Cho, Jin-Hee","Luther, Kurt"],"dc:contributor.department":["Computer Science"],"dc:creator":["Sun, Stephen Wei-Hao"],"dc:date.accessioned":["2022-06-04T08:00:42Z"],"dc:date.available":["2022-06-04T08:00:42Z"],"dc:date.issued":["2022-06-03"],"dc:description.abstract":["Recently it is obvious that climate change has became a critical topic for human society. As climate change becomes more severe, natural disasters caused by climate change have increasingly impacted humans. Most recently, Hurricane Ida killed 43 people across four states. Hurricane Ida's damage could top $95 billion, and many meteorologists predict that climate change is making storms wetter and wider. Thus, there is an urgent need to predict how much damage the flood will cause and prepare for possible destruction. Most current flood damage estimation system did not apply social media data. The theme of this thesis was to evaluate the feasibility of using machine learning models to predict hurricane damage and the input data are social media and satellite imagery. This work involves developing Data Mining approach and a couple of different Machine Learning models that further extract the feature from the data. Satellite imagery is used to identify changes in building structures as well as landscapes, and Twitter data is used to identify damaged locations and the severity of the damage. The features of Twitter posts and satellite imagery were extracted through pre-trained GloVe, ResNet, and VGG models separately. The embedding features were then fed to MLP models for damage level estimation. The models were trained and evaluated on the data. Finally, a case study was performed on the test dataset for hints on improving the models."],"dc:description.abstractgeneral":["Natural disasters affect Millions of people's lives each year and it is becoming even more severe because of global warming. To make rescue more efficient when the roads and bridges are cut, social media and satellite imagery are effective data sources to help estimating flood damage. With the growth of social media, it is obvious that the post and information from people on the Internet are powerful. Also, with image processing technology improves, the information extracted from satellite images is crucial. In this work we have developed a data mining approach along with different combinations of pre-trained models using neural networks, satellite imagery and archived data from Twitter to estimate flood damage. The data mining approach leverages keywords to identify the event in the history posts in the Twitter, more specifically, we attain the geo-location, time, language information from Twitter, also using pre-event and post-event images which satellite took to generate vectors and thus effectively acquire very useful embedding features. With vectored information from Twitter and satellite imagery, we use pre-trained models and generate damage level prediction. The final results suggest that the proposed approach has potential to create more accurate prediction by using multiple data as input. Furthermore, the estimate result by using only satellite images even outperformed the result using Twitter information, which is an unexpected result comparing to previous studies."],"dc:description.degree":["Master of Science"],"dc:format.medium":["ETD"],"dc:identifier.other":["vt_gsexam:35228"],"dc:identifier.uri":["http://hdl.handle.net/10919/110429"],"dc:language.iso":["en"],"dc:publisher":["Virginia Tech"],"dc:rights":["In Copyright"],"dc:rights.uri":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dc:subject":["Data Mining","Social Media","Twitter","Spatial Data Management"],"dc:title":["Estimate Flood Damage Using Satellite Images and Twitter Data"],"dc:type":["Thesis"],"thesis:degree_discipline":["Computer Science and Applications"],"thesis:degree_level":["masters"],"thesis:degree_name":["Master of Science"],"thesis:institution_name":["Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:20:26Z"}