MAD-SAR: A Multi-Agent Agentic Engineering Framework for Landslide Detection Using Sentinel-1 SAR Imagery

Rapid and accurate detection of landslide-affected areas is critical for disaster response and risk mitigation. Sentinel-1 SAR imagery offers all-weather, day-and-night observation capability, but existing deep learning approaches treat landslide detection as a single-pass segmentation problem, which limits performance in complex terrain where backscatter changes are confounded by soil moisture, surface roughness, urban double bounce, shadow, and layover effects. MAD-SAR, a rule-based agentic framework that coordinates anomaly detection, super-resolution, object detection, and semantic segmentation under a planning orchestrator and a physics-aware validation engine is proposed. The orchestrator selects specialist modules, their execution order, and the number of refinement iterations according to a scene complexity score computed from SAR-derived statistics. The physics-aware validation engine cross-checks every candidate detection against backscatter change thresholds, DEM-derived slope constraints, and radar geometry masks before any detection is committed to the output. MAD-SAR is evaluated on three Japanese disaster datasets: Hiroshima 2018, Kumamoto 2016, and Ibaraki 2019. On the held-out Ibaraki test event, the framework achieves an F1-score of 0.863 and IoU of 0.759, outperforming all baselines and reducing false alarms by 45% relative to standalone SegFormer. Ablation results confirm that each module contributes to the final performance. These results suggest that multi-module orchestration with embedded physical validation can meaningfully improve SAR-based landslide mapping, though broader validation across regions, sensor configurations, and failure mechanisms remains necessary.