Landslides Information Extraction Using Object-Oriented Image Analysis Paradigm Based on Deep Learning and Transfer Learning

Abstract

How to acquire landslide disaster information quickly and accurately has become the focus and difficulty of disaster prevention and relief by remote sensing. Landslide disasters are generally featured by sudden occurrence, proposing high demand for emergency data acquisition. The low-altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) remote sensing technology is widely applied to acquire landslide disaster data, due to its convenience, high efficiency, and ability to fly at low altitude under cloud. However, the spectrum information of UAV images is generally deficient and manual interpretation is difficult for meeting the need of quick acquisition of emergency data. Based on this, UAV images of high-occurrence areas of landslide disaster in Wenchuan County and Baoxing County in Sichuan Province, China were selected for research in the paper. Firstly, the acquired UAV images were pre-processed to generate orthoimages. Subsequently, multi-resolution segmentation was carried out to obtain image objects, and the barycenter of each object was calculated to generate a landslide sample database (including positive and negative samples) for deep learning. Next, four landslide feature models of deep learning and transfer learning, namely Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG), Bag of Visual Word (BOVW), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Transfer Learning (TL) were compared, and it was found that the TL model possesses the best feature extraction effect, so a landslide extraction method based on the TL model and object-oriented image analysis (TLOEL) was proposed; finally, the TLOEL method was compared with the object-oriented nearest neighbor classification (NNC) method. The research results show that the accuracy of the TLOEL method is higher than the NNC method, which can not only achieve the edge extraction of large landslides, but also detect and extract middle and small landslides accurately that are scatteredly distributed.

Review on remote sensing methods for landslide detection using machine and deep learning

“…Reference 80 developed a deep learning approach with constraints for detection of landslides from hyperspectral images. Reference 81 implemented a landslide extraction method based on transfer learning and object‐oriented image analysis (TLOEL), which was proposed and compared with object‐oriented nearest neighbor classification (NNC) method. Reference 82 implemented “ Temporal convolutional neural network (TempCNNs) ” a type of deep learning technique used to convolve in the temporal dimension to determine spectral and temporal features.…”

A Cyclic Information–Interaction Model for Remote Sensing Image Segmentation

“…Transfer learning approaches: There have been many efforts to utilize the transfer learning for processing remote sensing imagery [37]. The first successful application of these models to object tracking was presented by Wang et.al.…”

Landslide Detection from Open Satellite Imagery Using Distant Domain Transfer Learning

“…Machine learning has two requirements before training a classification model: it needs sufficient training data, and the training data must have the same distribution as the validation data [28,29]. Unfortunately, in this study, the study area, Longgang, China, is unique and has only 177 landslide samples, which is not enough to train a robust classification model.…”

“…Obtaining labeled training data always requires considerable costs and has limitations [1,28]. Therefore, we introduce the transfer learning algorithm to solve the problem [29,30]. Transfer learning can eliminate these two disadvantages by transferring knowledge from the source domain to the target domain [31].…”