Dynamic monitoring of surface area and water volume of reservoirs using satellite imagery, computer vision and deep learning

Abstract

The development of surface area and estimated volume measurements for water reservoirs using advanced computational techniques has become an increasingly important task for reservoir operation. Thus, the objective of this study is to determine the surface area and estimate the volume of water reservoirs through the segmentation of multispectral satellite images using a Fully Convolutional Neural Network (FCN). This paper introduces a universally applicable framework that utilizes deep convolutional neural networks for segmenting water bodies, particularly focusing on areas in Paraíba State, Northeast Brazil, susceptible to severe droughts. The study utilized Sentinel-2 satellite data obtained from Google Earth Engine for the period between January 2019 and September 2023. The extraction of water surface area from satellite images was achieved using the U-Net model, a deep learning framework based on FCN. The accuracy of water surface area extraction was analyzed using the Intersection-Over-Union (IoU) metric, also known as Jaccard Index. Subsequently, reservoir volumes were calculated using elevation-area-volume curves. The evaluation metrics for the results included root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), coefficient of determination (R2), and Pearson correlation coefficient (r). The network demonstrated high accuracy, achieving a 95% IoU on the test set. This methodology was applied to four reservoirs, yielding promising results that closely aligned the monitored reservoir curves derived from satellite imagery with observed field data. The findings of this study are significant for research on semiarid region changes, extending their relevance to a broader understanding of global environmental dynamics. This work not only contributes to the field of remote sensing in hydrology but also offers practical insights for effective water resource management in drought-prone regions.