Title
Sentinel-1-Based Water and Flood Mapping: Benchmarking Convolutional Neural Networks Against an Operational Rule-Based Processing Chain
Abstract
In this study, the effectiveness of several convolutional neural network architectures (AlbuNet-34/FCN/DeepLabV3+/U-Net/U-Net++) for water and flood mapping using Sentinel-1 amplitude data is compared to an operational rule-based processor (S-1FS). This comparison is made using a globally distributed dataset of Sentinel-1 scenes and the corresponding ground truth water masks derived from Sentinel-2 data to evaluate the performance of the classifiers on a global scale in various environmental conditions. The impact of using single versus dual-polarized input data on the segmentation capabilities of AlbuNet-34 is evaluated. The weighted cross entropy loss is combined with the Lovasz loss and various data augmentation methods are investigated. Furthermore, the concept of atrous spatial pyramid pooling used in DeepLabV3+ and the multiscale feature fusion inherent in U-Net++ are assessed. Finally, the generalization capacity of AlbuNet-34 is tested in a realistic flood mapping scenario by using additional data from two flood events and the Sen1Floods11 dataset. The model trained using dual polarized data outperforms the S-1FS significantly and increases the intersection over union (IoU) score by 5%. Using a weighted combination of the cross entropy and the Lovasz loss increases the IoU score by another 2%. Geometric data augmentation degrades the performance while radiometric data augmentation leads to better testing results. FCN/DeepLabV3+/U-Net/U-Net++ perform not significantly different to AlbuNet-34. Models trained on data showing no distinct inundation perform very well in mapping the water extent during two flood events, reaching IoU scores of 0.96 and 0.94, respectively, and perform comparatively well on the Sen1Floods11 dataset.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/JSTARS.2022.3152127
IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Floods, Data models, Synthetic aperture radar, Convolutional neural networks, Training, Sea surface, Thresholding (Imaging), Convolutional neural networks, data augmentation, semantic segmentation, Sen1Floods11, Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, surface water monitoring
Journal
15
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1939-1404
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Max Helleis100.34
Marc Wieland200.34
Christian Krullikowski300.34
Sandro Martinis400.34
Simon Plank500.34