Deep Learning-Based Flood Area Extraction for Fully Automated and Persistent Flood Monitoring Using Cloud Computing

Satellite-based flood monitoring for providing visual information on the targeted areas is crucial in responding to and recovering from river floods. However, such monitoring for practical purposes has been constrained mainly by obtaining and analyzing satellite data, and linking and optimizing the required processes. For these purposes, we present a deep learning-based flood area extraction model for a fully automated flood monitoring system, which is designed to continuously operate on a cloud-based computing platform for regularly extracting flooded area from Sentinel-1 data, and providing visual information on flood situations with better image segmentation accuracy. To develop the new flood area extraction model using deep learning, initial model tests were performed more than 500 times to determine optimal hyperparameters, water ratio, and best band combination. The results of this research showed that at ‘waterbody ratio 30%’, which yielded higher segmentation accuracies and lower loss, precision, overall accuracy, IOU, recall, and F1 score of ‘VV, aspect, topographic wetness index, and buffer input bands’ were 0.976, 0.956, 0.894, 0.964, and 0.970, respectively, and averaged inference time was 744.3941 s, which demonstrate improved image segmentation accuracy and reduced processing time. The operation and robustness of the fully automated flood monitoring system were demonstrated by automatically segmenting 12 Sentinel-1 images for the two major flood events in Republic of Korea during 2020 and 2022 in accordance with the hyperparameters, waterbody ratio, and band combinations determined through the intensive tests. Visual inspection of the outputs showed that misclassification of constructed facilities and mountain shadows were extremely reduced. It is anticipated that the fully automated flood monitoring system and the deep leaning-based waterbody extraction model presented in this research could be a valuable reference and benchmark for other countries trying to build a cloud-based flood monitoring system for rapid flood monitoring using deep learning.