Coastal Inundation Mapping From Bitemporal and Dual‐Polarization SAR Imagery Based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

This study develops an effective and robust method to mine bitemporal and dual-polarization synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery information for coastal inundation mapping, based on deep convolutional neural networks. The specially tailored deep convolutional neural network-based SAR coastal flooding mapping network (SARCFMNet) leverages two modifications to improve the accuracy and robustness: the physics-aware input information design and the regularization. The proposed SARCFMNet is applied to the mapping and impact analysis of the coastal inundation caused by 2017 Hurricane Harvey near Houston, Texas, USA. Six pairs of Sentinel-1 SAR images are analyzed along with corresponding ground truth data from Copernicus Emergency Management Service Rapid Mapping products and land-cover types from Google Earth and OpenStreetMap. Flooded areas of 4,000 km 2 are extracted and analyzed. In an analyzed scene, 76% of the flooded area was agriculture area like pasture and cultivated crops field. A flooding map series shows the inundation shrinking rate is about 1% of the analyzed scene per day after the passage of Harvey. However, there was a delayed inundation in Glen Flora, Texas, after the heavy raining period. The average mapping accuracy and F1 score, that is, the harmonic mean of recall and precision, are 0.98 and 0.88, respectively. The impact of wind and cost-sensitive loss functions on the development of SARCFMNet is also discussed. This study demonstrates the proposed method can accurately map hurricane-induced inundation. The method can also be readily extended to other multitemporal SAR imagery classification applications. Plain Language SummaryCoastal flooding caused by hurricanes has a huge impact on the safety and properties of people in coastal areas. Coastal flooding mapping using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is a low-cost and wide-coverage means; moreover, SAR has day-and-night, all-weather observation abilities. High-accuracy and robust coastal flooding mapping from SAR imagery information will help the management to formulate more targeted responses and the researchers to better understand coastal flooding mechanisms and develop more precise forecasting models. Based on deep convolutional neural networks, a specially tailored SAR coastal flooding mapping network method is developed to mine bitemporal and dual-polarization SAR imagery information for coastal flooding mapping. The performance of the proposed SAR coastal flooding mapping network is demonstrated by mapping the coastal flooding near Houston, Texas, USA, after 2017 Hurricane Harvey. The study verifies that the mapping accuracy and robustness of the proposed method are better than those of the classic and widely applied deep convolutional neural network method and also shows the mapping products contribute to a better understanding of the geospatial and temporal characteristics of coastal flooding.

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