Natural disasters detection using explainable deep learning

Deep learning applications have far-reaching implications in people’s daily lives. Disaster management professionals are becoming increasingly interested in applying deep learning to prepare for and respond to natural disasters. In this paper, we aim to assist natural disaster management professionals in preparing for disasters by developing a framework that can accurately classify natural disasters and interpret the results using a combination of a deep learning model and an XAI method to ensure reliability and ease of interpretation without a technical background. Two main aspects categorize the novelty of our work. The first is utilizing pre-trained Models such as VGGNet19, ResNet50, and ViT for accurate classification of natural disaster images. The second is implementing three explainable AI techniques-Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), Grad CAM++, and Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) to ensure the interpretability of the model’s predictions, making the decision-making process transparent and reliable. Experiments on the Natural disaster datasets (Niloy et al. 2021) and MEDIC with a ViT-B-32 model achieved a high accuracy of 95.23%. Additionally, explainable artificial intelligence techniques such as LIME, Grad-CAM, and Grad-CAM++ are used to evaluate model performance and visualize decision-making. Our code is available at.11https://github.com/tariqshaban/disaster-classification-with-xai. [Display omitted] •Deep learning models were proposed for natural disaster image classification.•The models assist in disaster management to help reduce the damage and losses from natural disasters.•Due to the use of Explainable AI techniques, Natural disaster management professionals without technical backgrounds will find the proposed approach very reliable.