A New Mask R-CNN-Based Method for Improved Landslide Detection

This article presents a novel method of landslide detection by exploiting the Mask R-CNN capability of identifying an object layout by using a pixel-based segmentation, along with transfer learning used to train the proposed model. A data set of 160 elements is created containing landslide and nonlandslide images. The proposed method consists of three steps: augmenting training image samples to increase the volume of the training data; fine-tuning with limited image samples; and performance evaluation of the algorithm in terms of precision, recall, and F1 measure, on the considered landslide images, by adopting ResNet-50 and 101 as backbone models. The experimental results are quite encouraging as the proposed method achieves precision equals to 1.00, recall 0.93, and F1 measure 0.97, when ResNet-101 is used as backbone model, and with a low number of landslide photographs used as training samples. The proposed algorithm can be potentially useful for land-use planners and policymakers of hilly areas where intermittent slope deformations necessitate landslide detection as a prerequisite before planning.