A New Deep-Learning-Based Approach for Earthquake-Triggered Landslide Detection From Single-Temporal RapidEye Satellite Imagery

Abstract

Accurate landslide detection and mapping are essential for land use planning, management/assessment, and geo-disaster risk mitigation as well as post-disaster reconstructions. Till now, visual interpretation and field survey are still the most widely adopted techniques for landslide mapping, which are often criticized labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly. With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, deep-learning-based approach for landslide detection and mapping has drawn great attention for its significant advantages over the traditional techniques. However, lack of sufficient training samples has constrained the application of deep-learning-based approach in landslide detection from satellite images for a long time. The present study aimed to examine the feasibility of a new deep-learning-based approach to intelligently detect and map earthquake-triggered landslides from single-temporal RapidEye satellite images. Specifically, the proposed approach consists of three steps. First of all, a standard data preprocessing workflow to automatically generate training samples was designed and some data augmentation strategies were implemented to alleviate the lack of training samples. Then, a cascaded end-to-end deep learning network, namely LandsNet, was constructed to learn various features of landslides. Finally, the identified landslide maps were further optimized with morphological processing. Experiments in two spatially independent earthquake-affected regions showed our proposed approach yielded the best F1 value of about 86.89%, which was about 7% and 8% higher than that obtained by ResUNet and DeepUNet, respectively. Comparative studies on the feasibility and robustness of the proposed approach with ResUNet and DeepUNet demonstrated its strong application potentials in the emergency response of natural disasters.