Rapid visual screening of soft-story buildings from street view images using deep learning classification

Rapid and accurate identification of potential structural deficiencies is a crucial task in evaluating seismic vulnerability of large building inventories in a region. In the case of multi-story structures, abrupt vertical variations of story stiffness are known to significantly increase the likelihood of collapse during moderate or severe earthquakes. Identifying and retrofitting buildings with such irregularities—generally termed as soft-story buildings—is, therefore, vital in earthquake preparedness and loss mitigation efforts. Soft-story building identification through conventional means is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. In this study, an automated procedure was devised based on deep learning techniques for identifying soft-story buildings from street-view images at a regional scale. A database containing a large number of building images and a semi-automated image labeling approach that effectively annotates new database entries was developed for developing the deep learning model. Extensive computational experiments were carried out to examine the effectiveness of the proposed procedure, and to gain insights into automated soft-story building identification.