DisasterTD: Disaster Toponym Disambiguation Using Multimodal LLMs and Cross-View Geolocalization
Social media imagery often contains vague or ambiguous geographic references, making accurate geolocalization challenging during disasters. The proposed DisasterTD framework integrates multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for semantic reasoning with cross-view geolocalization. It first extracts toponyms and generates candidate locations from noisy text, then refines them via cross-view matching among social media, remote sensing, and street-view imagery. Evaluated on the Hurricane Harvey dataset, it achieves 47.01% accuracy within 50 meters, significantly outperforming baselines, especially for ambiguous toponyms.
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[Submitted on 26 Jul 2026]
Title:DisasterTD: Disaster Toponym Disambiguation Using Multimodal LLMs and Cross-View Geolocalization
View a PDF of the paper titled DisasterTD: Disaster Toponym Disambiguation Using Multimodal LLMs and Cross-View Geolocalization, by Wenping Yin and 5 other authors
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Abstract:Social media imagery (SMI) provides timely and fine-grained ground perspectives that are valuable for situational awareness and emergency response. Unlike satellite or aerial imagery, SMI can capture disaster impacts and ground-level conditions in a timely manner. However, geographic references in SMI are often vague or ambiguous, making accurate geolocalization challenging. To address this issue, we propose DisasterTD, a disaster toponym disambiguation framework that integrates multimodal large language model (MLLMs)-based semantic reasoning with cross-view geolocalization. First, MLLMs extract toponyms and generate candidate geolocations from noisy textual inputs. Then, cross-view matching between SMI, remote sensing imagery (RSI), and optionally street-view imagery (SVI) is used to verify and refine these candidate results. We evaluate DisasterTD on the Hurricane Harvey dataset, where SMI is augmented with collected RSI and SVI to construct a cross-view benchmark for disaster geolocalization. The dataset is divided into four categories based on toponym clarity and ambiguity, allowing a fine-grained performance analysis across scenarios. Results show that DisasterTD consistently outperforms MLLM-only and cross-view-only baselines without disambiguation, achieving geolocalization accuracies of 71.62% within 1000 m, 62.36% within 500 m, 57.99% within 250 m, 52.09% within 100 m, and 47.01% within 50 m, while reducing the mean and median errors to 11.33 km and 0.68 km, respectively. The largest improvements appear in ambiguous toponyms, where semantic reasoning with cross-view evidence reduces candidate dispersion and errors. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating MLLM-based candidate generation with cross-view verification for fine-grained disaster geolocalization.
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2607.24856 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2607.24856v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.24856
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Hao Li [view email] [v1] Sun, 26 Jul 2026 02:51:53 UTC (20,677 KB)
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