Abstract
Abstract. Earthen levees have an important role to protect large areas of inhabited and cultivated land in the US from flooding. Failure of the levees can threaten the loss of life and property. One of the problems which can lead to a complete failure during a high water event is a slough slide. In this research, we are trying to detect such slides using X-band SAR data. Our methodology consists of the following four steps: 1) segmentation of the levee area from background; 2) extracting features including backscatter features and texture features; 3) training a back propagation neural network classifier using ground-truth data; and 4) testing the area of interest and validation of the results using ground truth data. A dual-polarimetric X-band image is acquired from the German TerraSAR-X satellite. Ground-truth data include the slides and healthy area. The study area is an approximately 1 km stretch of levee along the lower Mississippi River in the United States. The output classification shows the two classes of healthy and slide areas. The results show classification accuracies of approximately 67% for detecting the slide pixels.
Highlights
Earthen levees have an important role to protect large areas of inhabited and cultivated land in the US from flooding
An algorithm based on a neural network is developed to detect landslides on levees from single-pass polarimetric SAR
The roughness and corresponding textural characteristics of the soil in a slide can change the amount and pattern of radar backscatter. Exploiting these changes in texture and backscatter pattern, an algorithm based on a neural network and TerraSAR-X data is developed to detect a landslide on the levee system
Summary
Earthen levees have an important role to protect large areas of inhabited and cultivated land in the US from flooding. A failure of the levees can threaten the loss of life and property. There are more than 150,000 kilometres of levee structure with different designs and conditions over the entire US. One of the problems which can lead to a complete failure during a high water event is a slough slide. Slough slides are slope failures along a levee. A slough slide leaves areas of the levee vulnerable to seepage and failure during high water events. The roughness and corresponding textural characteristics of the soil in a slide can change the amount and pattern of radar backscatter (Aanstoos, 2011). The reasons that a slide occurs are studied in Hossain et al (2006)
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