Rapid Debris-Volume Estimation from Post-Hurricane Aerial Imagery

Abstract

Hurricane debris removal is planned, contracted, and federally reimbursed on the basis of volume estimates, yet operational practice still relies on parametric forecasts with 41-90% documented over-estimation or on truck-load tallies that arrive only after hauling begins. We present DebrisHeightNet, a segmentation-conditioned monocular debris-height network that estimates spatially explicit debris volume from a single pass of post-event aerial RGB imagery, the kind of survey routinely flown within days of a hurricane landfall. We train only a lightweight 1.08 M-parameter head on top of two frozen vision foundation models. This head regresses height from a Depth Anything V2 backbone, conditioned on the debris segmentation of CLIPSeg-debris from our prior work. Because no post-hurricane debris-height ground truth exists, we synthesize the training target by confidence-weighted LiDAR-monocular fusion (CW-LMF), designed to suppress non-debris LiDAR returns. This fused target is a constructed supervision signal rather than ground truth, so we corroborate it against external references rather than claiming it as truth. A region-level power-law calibration, driven by each region's low-density debris fraction, converts model volume into an estimate of the reported hauled debris with quantified uncertainty. Across ten regions spanning five hurricanes and three states, the uncalibrated model agrees with an independent uncrewed-aerial-vehicle (UAV) survey of the training region at Spearman $\rho = 0.87$ and lands within 30% of the reported record where the Hazus and FEMA-hybrid parametric forecasts over-predict it by 2.7-4.8$\times$. Deployment requires no LiDAR, no ground access, and no second flight, so the method can produce spatially explicit volume estimates wherever single-pass post-event imagery is flown.