Automatic flood detection from Sentinel-1 data using Deep learning:
Demonstration of NASA-ETCI Benchmark datasets.
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.