Matrix segnet: A practical deep learning framework for landslide mapping from images of different areas with different spatial resolutions

Abstract

Practical landslide inventory maps covering large-scale areas are essential in emergency response and geohazard analysis. Recently proposed techniques in landslide detection generally focused on landslides in pure vegetation backgrounds and image radiometric correction. There are still challenges in regard to robust methods that automatically detect landslides from images with multiple platforms and without radiometric correction. It is a significant issue in practical application. In order to detect landslides from images over different large-scale areas with different spatial resolutions, this paper proposes a two-branch Matrix SegNet to semantically segment input images by change detection. The Matrix SegNet learns landslide features in multiple scales and aspect ratios. The pre- and post- event images are captured directly from Google Earth, without radiometric correction. To evaluate the proposed framework, we conducted landslide detection in four study areas with two different spatial resolutions. Moreover, two other widely used frameworks: U-Net and SegNet, were adapted to detect landslides via the same data by change detection. The experiments show that our model improves the performance largely in terms of recall, precision, F1-score, and IOU. It is a good starting point to develop a practical, deep learning landslide detection framework for large scale application, using images from different areas, with different spatial resolutions.