Utilizing an interactive AI-empowered web portal for landslide labeling for establishing a landslide database in Washington state, USA

Landslides are common natural disasters around the globe. Understanding the accurate spatial distribution of landslides is essential for landslide analysis, prediction, and hazard mitigation. So far, many techniques have been used for landslide mapping to establish landslide inventories. However, these techniques either have a low automation level (e.g., visual interpretation-based methods) or a low generalization ability (e.g., pixel-based or object-based approaches); and improvements are required for landslide mapping. Therefore, we have developed an interactive, user-friendly web portal for landslide labeling. The web portal takes multi-temporal satellite images as inputs. A deep learning model will first detect landslide-suspicious areas in the image and present results to users for validation. Users can then review and annotate these machine-labeled landslides through a user-friendly interface. Users’ editions on landslide annotation will further improve the accuracy of the deep learning model. Two landslide-affected regions in Washington were selected to test the capability of our web portal for landslide mapping. The detected landslides were validated by expert labelers. The results indicated that our annotation tool was able to produce landslide maps with high precision, a high rate of annotation, and reduced human efforts.