Landslide Inventory Mapping From Bitemporal Images Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

Most of the approaches used for Landslide inventory mapping (LIM) rely on traditional feature extraction and unsupervised classification algorithms. However, it is difficult to use these approaches to detect landslide areas because of the complexity and spatial uncertainty of landslides. In this letter, we propose a novel approach based on a fully convolutional network within pyramid pooling (FCN-PP) for LIM. The proposed approach has three advantages. First, this approach is automatic and insensitive to noise because multivariate morphological reconstruction is used for image preprocessing. Second, it is able to take into account features from multiple convolutional layers and explore efficiently the context of images, which leads to a good tradeoff between wider receptive field and the use of context. Finally, the selected PP module addresses the drawback of global pooling employed by convolutional neural network, FCN, and U-Net, and, thus, provides better feature maps for landslide areas. Experimental results show that the proposed FCN-PP is effective for LIM, and it outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of five metrics, Precision, Recall, Overall Error, F - score, and Accuracy.