Landslides represent a severe hazard in many areas of the world. Accurate landslide maps are needed to document the occurrence and extent of landslides and to investigate their distribution, types, and the pattern of slope failures. Landslide maps are also crucial for determining landslide susceptibility and risk. Satellite data have been widely used for such investigations—next to data from airborne or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-borne campaigns and Digital Elevation Models (DEMs). We have developed a methodology that incorporates object-based image analysis (OBIA) with three machine learning (ML) methods, namely, the multilayer perceptron neural network (MLP-NN) and random forest (RF), for landslide detection. We identified the optimal scale parameters (SP) and used them for multi-scale segmentation and further analysis. We evaluated the resulting objects using the object pureness index (OPI), object matching index (OMI), and object fitness index (OFI) measures. We then applied two different methods to optimize the landslide detection task: (a) an ensemble method of stacking that combines the different ML methods for improving the performance, and (b) Dempster–Shafer theory (DST), to combine the multi-scale segmentation and classification results. Through the combination of three ML methods and the multi-scale approach, the framework enhanced landslide detection when it was tested for detecting earthquake-triggered landslides in Rasuwa district, Nepal. PlanetScope optical satellite images and a DEM were used, along with the derived landslide conditioning factors. Different accuracy assessment measures were used to compare the results against a field-based landslide inventory. All ML methods yielded the highest overall accuracies ranging from 83.3% to 87.2% when using objects with the optimal SP compared to other SPs. However, applying DST to combine the multi-scale results of each ML method significantly increased the overall accuracies to almost 90%. Overall, the integration of OBIA with ML methods resulted in appropriate landslide detections, but using the optimal SP and ML method is crucial for success.

Gully erosion is a dominant source of sediment and particulates to the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) World Heritage area. We selected the Bowen catchment, a tributary of the Burdekin Basin, as our area of study; the region is associated with a high density of gully networks. We aimed to use a semi-automated object-based gully networks detection process using a combination of multi-source and multi-scale remote sensing and ground-based data. An advanced approach was employed by integrating geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA) with current machine learning (ML) models. These included artificial neural networks (ANN), support vector machines (SVM), and random forests (RF), and an ensemble ML model of stacking to deal with the spatial scaling problem in gully networks detection. Spectral indices such as the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and topographic conditioning factors, such as elevation, slope, aspect, topographic wetness index (TWI), slope length (SL), and curvature, were generated from Sentinel 2A images and the ALOS 12-m digital elevation model (DEM), respectively. For image segmentation, the ESP2 tool was used to obtain three optimal scale factors. On using object pureness index (OPI), object matching index (OMI), and object fitness index (OFI), the accuracy of each scale in image segmentation was evaluated. The scale parameter of 45 with OFI of 0.94, which is a combination of OPI and OMI indices, proved to be the optimal scale parameter for image segmentation. Furthermore, segmented objects based on scale 45 were overlaid with 70% and 30% of a prepared gully inventory map to select the ML models’ training and testing objects, respectively. The quantitative accuracy assessment methods of Precision, Recall, and an F1 measure were used to evaluate the model’s performance. Integration of GEOBIA with the stacking model using a scale of 45 resulted in the highest accuracy in detection of gully networks with an F1 measure value of 0.89. Here, we conclude that the adoption of optimal scale object definition in the GEOBIA and application of the ensemble stacking of ML models resulted in higher accuracy in the detection of gully networks.

Earthquakes and heavy rainfalls are the two leading causes of landslides around the world. Since they often occur across large areas, landslide detection requires rapid and reliable automatic detection approaches. Currently, deep learning (DL) approaches, especially different convolutional neural network and fully convolutional network (FCN) algorithms, are reliably achieving cutting-edge accuracies in automatic landslide detection. However, these successful applications of various DL approaches have thus far been based on very high resolution satellite images (e.g., GeoEye and WorldView), making it easier to achieve such high detection performances. In this study, we use freely available Sentinel-2 data and ALOS digital elevation model to investigate the application of two well-known FCN algorithms, namely the U-Net and residual U-Net (or so-called ResU-Net), for landslide detection. To our knowledge, this is the first application of FCN for landslide detection only from freely available data. We adapt the algorithms to the specific aim of landslide detection, then train and test with data from three different case study areas located in Western Taitung County (Taiwan), Shuzheng Valley (China), and Eastern Iburi (Japan). We characterize three different window size sample patches to train the algorithms. Our results also contain a comprehensive transferability assessment achieved through different training and testing scenarios in the three case studies. The highest f1-score value of 73.32% was obtained by ResU-Net, trained with a dataset from Japan, and tested on China’s holdout testing area using the sample patch size of 64 × 64 pixels.

Recent landslide detection studies have focused on pixel-based deep learning (DL) approaches. In contrast, intuitive annotation of landslides from satellite imagery is based on distinct features rather than individual pixels. This study examines the feasibility of the integration framework of a DL model with rule-based object-based image analysis (OBIA) to detect landslides. First, we designed a ResU-Net model and then trained and tested it in the Sentinel-2 imagery. Then we developed a simple rule-based OBIA with only four rulesets, applying it first to the original image dataset and then to the same dataset plus the resulting ResU-Net heatmap. The value of each pixel in the heatmap refers to the probability that the pixel belongs to either landslide or non-landslide classes. Thus, we evaluate three scenarios: ResU-Net, OBIA, and ResU-Net-OBIA. The landslide detection maps from three different classification scenarios were compared against a manual landslide inventory map using thematic accuracy assessment metrics: precision, recall, and f1-score. Our experiments in the testing area showed that the proposed integration framework yields f1-score values 8 and 22 percentage points higher than those of the ResU-Net and OBIA approaches, respectively.