📝 SummarXiv

Abstract

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 vision language models (VLMs) to classify damage from ground-level imagery. We propose and evaluate two pipelines applied to the 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires in California, a VLM (Pipeline A) and a VLM + large language model (LLM) approach (Pipeline B), that integrate structured prompts based on specific wildfire damage indicators. A primary scientific contribution of this study is demonstrating the VLMs efficacy in synthesizing information from multiple perspectives to identify nuanced damage, a critical limitation in existing literature. Our findings reveal that while single view assessments struggled to classify affected structures (F1 scores ranging from 0.225 to 0.511), the multi-view analysis yielded dramatic improvements (F1 scores ranging from 0.857 to 0.947). Moreover, the McNemar test confirmed that pipelines with a multi-view image assessment yields statistically significant classification improvements; however, the improvements this research observed between Pipeline A and B were not statistically significant. Thus, future research can explore the potential of LLM prompting in damage assessment. The practical contribution is an immediately deployable, flexible, and interpretable workflow that bypasses the need for supervised training, significantly accelerating triage and prioritization for disaster response practitioners.