On 3 April 2024, a magnitude 7.4 quake--Taiwan's strongest in 25 years--shook the country's eastern coast. Stringent building codes spared most structures, but mountainous and remote villages were devastated by landslides. When disasters affect large and inaccessible areas, responders often turn to satellite images to pinpoint affected areas and prioritise relief efforts. But mapping landslides from satellite imagery by eye can be time-intensive, said Lorenzo Nava, who is jointly based at Cambridge's Departments of Earth Sciences and Geography. "In the aftermath of a disaster, time really matters," he said.

In recent years, landslide disasters have reported frequently due to the extreme weather events of droughts, floods , storms, or the consequence of human activities such as deforestation, excessive exploitation of natural resources. However, automatically observing landslide is challenging due to the extremely large observing area and the rugged topography such as mountain or highland. This motivates us to propose an end-to-end deep-learning-based model which explores the remote sensing images for automatically observing landslide events. By considering remote sensing images as the input data, we can obtain free resource, observe large and rough terrains by time. To explore the remote sensing images, we proposed a novel neural network architecture which is for two tasks of landslide detection and landslide segmentation. We evaluated our proposed model on three different benchmark datasets of LandSlide4Sense, Bijie, and Nepal. By conducting extensive experiments, we achieve F1 scores of 98.23, 93.83 for the landslide detection task on LandSlide4Sense, Bijie datasets; mIoU scores of 63.74, 76.88 on the segmentation tasks regarding LandSlide4Sense, Nepal datasets. These experimental results prove potential to integrate our proposed model into real-life landslide observation systems.

Abstract: Landslides pose severe threats to infrastructure, economies, and human lives, necessitating accurate detection and predictive mapping across diverse geographic regions. With advancements in deep learning and remote sensing, automated landslide detection has become increasingly effective. This study presents a comprehensive approach integrating multi-source satellite imagery and deep learning models to enhance landslide identification and prediction. We leverage Sentinel-2 multispectral data and ALOS PALSAR-derived slope and Digital Elevation Model (DEM) layers to capture critical environmental features influencing landslide occurrences. Various geospatial analysis techniques are employed to assess the impact of terrain characteristics, vegetation cover, and rainfall on detection accuracy. Additionally, we evaluate the performance of multiple state-of-the-art deep learning segmentation models, including U-Net, DeepLabV3+, and Res-Net, to determine their effectiveness in landslide detection. The proposed framework contributes to the development of reliable early warning systems, improved disaster risk management, and sustainable land-use planning. Our findings provide valuable insights into the potential of deep learning and multi-source remote sensing in creating robust, scalable, and transferable landslide prediction models. Landslides represent a significant natural hazard, causing substantial environmental and socio-economic damage worldwide. The increasing frequency of extreme weather events, deforestation, and rapid urbanization have exacerbated the risks associated with landslides, highlighting the need for effective detection and monitoring strategies. Traditional landslide mapping techniques, including field surveys and manual interpretation of satellite imagery, are time-consuming, costly, and often constrained by limited spatial coverage.

Knowledge about historic landslide event occurrence is important for supporting disaster risk reduction strategies. Building upon findings from 2022 Landslide4Sense Competition, we propose a deep neural network based system for landslide detection and segmentation from multisource remote sensing image input. We use a U-Net trained with Cross Entropy loss as baseline model. We then improve the U-Net baseline model by leveraging a wide range of deep learning techniques. In particular, we conduct feature engineering by generating new band data from the original bands, which helps to enhance the quality of remote sensing image input. Regarding the network architecture, we replace traditional convolutional layers in the U-Net baseline by a residual-convolutional layer. We also propose an attention layer which leverages the multi-head attention scheme. Additionally, we generate multiple output masks with three different resolutions, which creates an ensemble of three outputs in the inference process to enhance the performance. Finally, we propose a combined loss function which leverages Focal loss and IoU loss to train the network. Our experiments on the development set of the Landslide4Sense challenge achieve an F1 score and an mIoU score of 84.07 and 76.07, respectively. Our best model setup outperforms the challenge baseline and the proposed U-Net baseline, improving the F1 score/mIoU score by 6.8/7.4 and 10.5/8.8, respectively.

Change detection using earth observation data plays a vital role in quantifying the impact of disasters in affected areas. While data sources like Sentinel-2 provide rich optical information, they are often hindered by cloud cover, limiting their usage in disaster scenarios. However, leveraging pre-disaster optical data can offer valuable contextual information about the area such as landcover type, vegetation cover, soil types, enabling a better understanding of the disaster's impact. In this study, we develop a model to assess the contribution of pre-disaster Sentinel-2 data in change detection tasks, focusing on disaster-affected areas. The proposed Context-Aware Change Detection Network (CACDN) utilizes a combination of pre-disaster Sentinel-2 data, pre and post-disaster Sentinel-1 data and ancillary Digital Elevation Models (DEM) data. The model is validated on flood and landslide detection and evaluated using three metrics: Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC), Intersection over Union (IoU), and mean IoU. The preliminary results show significant improvement (4\%, AUPRC, 3-7\% IoU, 3-6\% mean IoU) in model's change detection capabilities when incorporated with pre-disaster optical data reflecting the effectiveness of using contextual information for accurate flood and landslide detection.

Huge challenges exist for old landslide detection because their morphology features have been partially or strongly transformed over a long time and have little difference from their surrounding. Besides, small-sample problem also restrict in-depth learning. In this paper, an iterative classification and semantic segmentation network (ICSSN) is developed, which can greatly enhance both object-level and pixel-level classification performance by iteratively upgrading the feature extractor shared by two network. An object-level contrastive learning (OCL) strategy is employed in the object classification sub-network featuring a siamese network to realize the global features extraction, and a sub-object-level contrastive learning (SOCL) paradigm is designed in the semantic segmentation sub-network to efficiently extract salient features from boundaries of landslides. Moreover, an iterative training strategy is elaborated to fuse features in semantic space such that both object-level and pixel-level classification performance are improved. The proposed ICSSN is evaluated on the real landslide data set, and the experimental results show that ICSSN can greatly improve the classification and segmentation accuracy of old landslide detection. For the semantic segmentation task, compared to the baseline, the F1 score increases from 0.5054 to 0.5448, the mIoU improves from 0.6405 to 0.6610, the landslide IoU improved from 0.3381 to 0.3743, and the object-level detection accuracy of old landslides is enhanced from 0.55 to 0.9. For the object classification task, the F1 score increases from 0.8846 to 0.9230, and the accuracy score is up from 0.8375 to 0.8875.