Using 'imaginative' AI to survey past and future earthquake damage

Researchers have used artificial intelligence to develop a new tool for assessing earthquake damage, a leap that could ultimately help first responders in making critical rescue decisions, suggests a new study. The team's AI, called the LoRA-Enhanced Ground-view Generation (LEGG) diffusion model, is trained on real aerial drone images that it uses to create highly photorealistic 3D reconstructions of the ground. Creating imagery detailed enough to fully capture a region's physical characteristics distinguishes this synthetic model, enabling it to recognize complex visual patterns and predict where structures may be damaged, even in densely populated urban areas.