ARTFEED — Contemporary Art Intelligence

DisasterTD: Multimodal LLM Framework for Disaster Toponym Disambiguation

ai-technology · 2026-07-29

Researchers propose DisasterTD, a framework that uses multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and cross-view geolocalization to disambiguate vague geographic references in social media imagery (SMI) during disasters. The system first extracts toponyms and generates candidate locations from noisy text using MLLMs, then cross-matches SMI with remote sensing imagery (RSI) and street-view imagery (SVI) to verify results. Evaluation on the Hurricane Harvey dataset shows improved geolocalization accuracy. The approach addresses a key challenge in using SMI for situational awareness and emergency response.

Key facts

  • DisasterTD integrates MLLM-based semantic reasoning with cross-view geolocalization.
  • MLLMs extract toponyms and generate candidate geolocations from noisy textual inputs.
  • Cross-view matching between SMI, RSI, and optionally SVI verifies and refines candidate results.
  • Evaluated on the Hurricane Harvey dataset.
  • SMI provides timely ground perspectives for situational awareness and emergency response.
  • Geographic references in SMI are often vague or ambiguous.
  • Framework aims to improve accurate geolocalization of disaster-related SMI.
  • Published on arXiv with ID 2607.24856.

Entities

Institutions

  • arXiv

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