Abstract
Many technical infrastructure operators manage facilities distributed over large areas. They face the problem of finding out if a flood hit a specific facility located in the open countryside. Physical inspection after every heavy rain is time and personnel consuming, and equipping all facilities with flood detection is expensive. Therefore, methods are being sought to ensure that these facilities are monitored at a minimum cost. One of the possibilities is using remote sensing, especially radar data regularly scanned by satellites. A significant challenge in this area was the launch of Sentinel-1 providing free-of-charge data with adequate spatial resolution and relatively high revisit time. This paper presents a developed automatic processing chain for flood detection in the open landscape from Sentinel-1 data. Flood detection can be started on-demand; however, it mainly focuses on autonomous near real-time monitoring. It is based on a combination of algorithms for multi-temporal change detection and histogram thresholding open-water detection. The solution was validated on five flood events in four European countries by comparing its results with flood delineation derived from reference datasets. Long-term tests were also performed to evaluate the potential for a false positive occurrence. In the statistical classification assessments, the mean value of user accuracy (producer accuracy) for open-water class reached 83% (65%). The developed solution typically provided flooded polygons in the same areas as the reference dataset, but of a smaller size. This fact is mainly attributed to the use of universal sensitivity parameters, independent of the specific location, which ensure almost complete successful suppression of false alarms.
Highlights
Satellites equipped with a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) are being used in various applications utilizing an analysis of signal backscatter intensity and eventually its change in time
Validation results from four European countries, including five flood events, are presented separately in the following sub-sections
As the processing chain was developed for an automatic operation without user intervention in any given area of interest (AOI), identical settings of flood detection parameters were used for all evaluated events and areas
Summary
Satellites equipped with a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) are being used in various applications utilizing an analysis of signal backscatter intensity and eventually its change in time. A SAR intensity threshold allowing the pixels representing the water surface to be distinguished from others (mainly corresponding to land) is sought in most of the references (such as [1,2,3]). According to the cited references, the threshold, which depends on many factors, including meteorological conditions (wind, temperature), differs for each image, and has to be estimated from the evaluated data. The estimation of this water–land threshold is, a crucial part of the algorithm
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