VRBagged-Net: Ensemble Based Deep Learning Model for Disaster Event Classification

A flood is an overflow of water that swamps dry land. The gravest effects of flooding are the loss of human life and economic losses. An early warning of these events can be very effective in minimizing the losses. Social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook are quite effective in the efficient dissemination of information pertinent to any emergency. Users on these social networking sites share both textual and rich content images and videos. The Multimedia Evaluation Benchmark (MediaEval) offers challenges in the form of shared tasks to develop and evaluate new algorithms, approaches and technologies for explorations and exploitations of multimedia in decision making for real time problems. Since 2015, the MediaEval has been running a shared task of predicting several aspects of flooding and through these shared tasks, many improvements have been observed. In this paper, the classification framework VRBagged-Net is proposed and implemented for flood classification. The framework utilizes the deep learning models Visual Geometry Group (VGG) and Residual Network (ResNet), along with the technique of Bootstrap aggregating (Bagging). Various disaster-based datasets were selected for the validation of the VRBagged-Net framework. All the datasets belong to the MediaEval Benchmark Workshop, this includes Disaster Image Retrieval from Social Media (DIRSM), Flood Classification for Social Multimedia (FCSM) and Image based News Topic Disambiguation (INTD). VRBagged-Net performed encouraging well in all these datasets with slightly different but relevant tasks. It produces Mean Average Precision at different levels of 98.12, and Average Precision at 480 of 93.64 on DIRSM. On the FCSM dataset, it produces an F1 score of 90.58. Moreover, the framework has been applied on the dataset of Image-Based News Topic Disambiguation (INTD), and exceeds the previous best result by producing an F1 evaluation of 93.76. The VRBagged-Net with a slight modification also ranked first in the flood-related Multimedia Task at the MediaEval Workshop 2020