MASAI – Map for Damage Assessment with Satellite Artificial Intelligence is a web platform developed within the European Space Agency-funded MASAI project following the war in Ukraine. The tool aims to assess the condition of critical infrastructure and residential buildings in areas involved in humanitarian crises by leveraging remote sensing processing techniques from SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) images and VHR (Very High Resolution, ~50 cm) optics.
MASAI responds to the needs of humanitarian operators (Italian Red Cross) and enables a complete, efficient and accurate assessment of the consequences of the humanitarian crisis, in terms of the level of damage to infrastructure, as well as providing an indication of the population affected and the economic damage. The application can adapt to different types of emergencies.
The platform allows viewing the outputs of two separate engines:
- SAR level obtained by interferometric and coherence analysis of affected areas in terms of level of infrastructure damage;
- VHR level obtained through high-resolution image analysis by exploiting AI change detection algorithms.
Product functionality
The MASAI platform makes it possible to:
- Identify damaged areas during the humanitarian crisis and in the post-conflict period by comparing pre-emergency terrain by exploiting remote sensing processing techniques on SAR and optical VHR satellite data;
- Assess the degree of damage to infrastructure and buildings on user-questionable maps;
- Evaluate the change over time of the damage to the areas under investigation by analyzing successive satellite images;
- Estimate the potential number of displaced persons in need of assistance and obtain a rough estimate of economic damage.
The web platform is easily accessible through major browsers and is designed with a modular structure using open-source technologies to minimize system implementation and maintenance costs to facilitate code sharing and reuse in the event of future humanitarian crises. Access to the platform is through authentication. Upon accessing the MASAI service, one lands on the home page that provides an overview of the areas available in the system, analyzed using SAR and VHR technologies (figure below).
The analysis section of the tool allows the user to visualize on the map the level of damage for the available time instants according to the technology (VHR or SAR) and a summary information returned through graphs of the analyzed parameters: level of damage, population affected and economic damage (figure below).
The comparison section also makes it possible to compare the processing of two different time instants to assess the evolution of emergence (figure below).
