Detecting Landslide Affected Areas Using Deep Learning of Bi-Temporal Satellite Imagery Datasets

Landslide is one of the most frequently occurred and destructive natural hazards in Taiwan and many other places around the world. Using satellite images to help identify landslide affected regions can be an effective and economic alternative comparing to conventional ground-based measures. However, utilizing remotely sensed images for the investigation and analysis of landslides still faces challenges. In a long-term monitoring of landslide affected areas, it is common to observe landslides occur repeatedly at or around the same region, thus requiring change-detection analysis of multi-temporal image datasets to identify this type (repeatedly occurred) landslides, especially to monitor its expansion. In recent years, machine learning techniques are extensively adopted for image analysis, including satellite images. Therefore, integrating change-detection with machine learning algorithms should be helpful for identifying and mapping incremental landslides from multi-temporal satellite images. This research developed a systematic deep learning framework for detecting landslides with bi-temporal satellite image pairs as the training datasets. The training datasets are extracted and labelled from multi-temporal high-resolution multi-spectral satellite images covering two watershed regions where landslides occurred frequently. Experimental results indicate that the developed machine learning algorithms can achieve high accuracies and perform better than conventional methods for detecting landslide affected areas from time-series satellite images, especially in the places where landslides may occur repeatedly.