Waterline Mapping and Change Detection of Tangjiashan Dammed Lake After Wenchuan Earthquake From Multitemporal High-Resolution Airborne SAR Imagery

Several dammed lakes caused by landslides and rock avalanches appeared after Wenchuan earthquake. Tangjiashan dammed lake was the largest one among all of them, which resulted in obvious threats to people around. In this paper, multitemporal high-resolution airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are used to map the waterline of Tangjiashan dammed lake and its change continuously, which is meaningful for flooding assessment and prediction. An approach combining different techniques is proposed for dammed lake segmentation. In this approach, subpatched intensity thresholding segmentation, morphological operators, and local Gaussian distribution fitting energy (LGDF)-based active contours model (ACM) are used in combination to get the final waterline. Flood-affected area is detected and its size is calculated for each segmental result. In addition, the variations of the flood-affected area are also obtained based on the difference of the above-mentioned segmental results. The proposed approach is tested on real SAR imagery acquired from three different dates in May, 2008 with high-temporal resolution in the same area containing Tangjiashan dammed lake. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.