The Multimedia Satellite Task at MediaEval 2018: Emergency Response for Flooding Events

This paper provides a description of the MediaEval 2018 Multimedia Satellite Task. The primary goal of the task is to extract and fuse con- tent associated with events represent in Satellite Imagery and Social Media. Establishing a link from Satellite Imagery to Social Multi- media can yield to a comprehensive event representation which is vital for numerous applications. Focusing on natural disaster events, the main objective of the task is to leverage the combined event representation within the context of emergency response and envi- ronmental monitoring. In particular, our task focuses on flooding events and consists of two subtasks. The first Image Classification from Social Media subtask requires participants to retrieve images from Social Media that show a direct evidence for road passabil- ity during flooding events. The second task Flood Detection from Satellite Images aims to extract potentially flooded road sections from satellite images. The task seeks to go beyond state-of-the-art flooding map generation by focusing on information about road passability and the accessibility of urban infrastructure. Such infor- mation shows a clear potential to complement information from social images with satellite imagery for emergency management.