Operational Flood Detection Using Sentinel-1 SAR Data over Large Areas

Unsupervised flood detection in large areas using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data always faces the challenge of automatic thresholding, because the histograms of large-scale images are unimodal, which thus makes it difficult to determine the threshold. In this paper, an iteratively multi-scale chessboard segmentation-based tiles selection method is introduced. This method includes a robust search procedure for tiles which obey bimodal Gaussian distribution, and a non-parametric histogram-based thresholding algorithm for thresholds identifying water areas. Then, the thresholds are integrated into the region-growing algorithm to obtain a consistent flood map. In addition, a classification refinement technique using multiresolution segmentation is proposed to address the omission in a heterogeneous flood area caused by water surface roughening due to weather factors (e.g., wind or rain). Experiments on the flooded area of Jialing River on July 2018 using Sentinel-1 images show a high classification accuracy of 99.05% through the validation of Landsat-8 data, indicating the validity of the proposed method.