The Use of LSTM-Based RNN and SVM Models to Detect Ludian Coseismic Landslides in Time Series Images

Abstract

With the increase of temporal frequency of satellite images, time series analysis based on Artificial Neural Network has become a tendency to detect land cover changes in images. We briefly introduces a case study that uses Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM), a specific Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for time series modelling and forecasting, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) to detect landslides triggered by Ms.6.5 earthquake in Ludian, China in 2014. The study uses 72 available images with 16/30m spatial resolution from Landsat-7/8, GaoFen-1 and HJ-1A/1B satellites. Firstly, per-pixel LSTM models are trained by Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) images before the earthquake. Secondly, the trained LSTM models are used to predict NDVI images after the earthquake. Then, anomalies or changes are detected by comparing predicted and observed NDVI images. Finally, anomalies related to landslides are separated from other changes with a SVM model which was trained by multi-spectral images in the study area. Experiment demonstrates that the recall rate and precision rate of landslides detection are 82.09% and 76.21%, respectively. The study shows a potential that the combination of LSTM and SVM models can be used to detect landslides in Landsat-like time series images with 30m resolution.