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Automatic flood detection from Sentinel-1 data using Deep learning: Demonstration of NASA-ETCI Benchmark datasets.
  • Shagun Garg,
  • Binayak Ghosh,
  • Mahdi Motagh
Shagun Garg
University of Cambridge

Corresponding Author:sg2009@cam.ac.uk

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Binayak Ghosh
Helmholtz-Zentrum Potsdam - Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum GFZ
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Mahdi Motagh
Helmholtz-Zentrum Potsdam - Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum GFZ & Leibniz University Hannover
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Abstract

Floods are the most frequent, costliest natural disasters having devastating consequences on people, infrastructure, and the ecosystem. The accurate and rapid mapping of the flooded areas becomes more crucial when floods strike densely populated cities. During flood events near real-time satellite imagery has been proven to be an efficient management tool for disaster management authorities. However one of the challenges is accurate classification and segmentation of flooded water and permanent water. Binary segmentation using the threshold split-based method is commonly used in this regard, however, the generalization ability of this method is limited due to the effects of backscatter, geographical area, and time of image collection. Recent advancements in deep learning algorithms for image segmentation has demonstrated the excellent potential of Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN) for improving flood detection, although there have been limited studies in this domain due to the lack of large scale labeled flood event dataset. In this project, we present a U-net based deep learning approach by leveraging publicly available Sentinel-1 dataset provided jointly by NASA Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team and IEEE GRSS Earth Science Informatics Technical Committee. Dataset is composed of 66,810 tiles of 256×256 pixels, distributed respectively across the training, validation and test sets and cover flood events from Nebraska, North Alabama, Bangladesh, Red River North and Florence. Specifically we proposed an Unet architecture based convolutional neural network (CNN) with a backbone of EfficientNetb7, trained against the dataset. We then evaluated the performance of the model with multiple training, testing and validation. Two evaluation methods - Intersection over Union (IOU) and F-Score are adopted to evaluate the model performance. During testing, the model achieved the meanIOU score of 75.06% and F-Score of 74.98%. We hope to further improve the performance of the network by performing hyper-parameter tuning and to develop a model which can be used for near-real-time flood mapping.