A rapid high-resolution multi-sensory urban flood mapping framework via DEM upscaling

Abstract

Urban floods can cause severe loss of economic and social assets, and remote sensing has been an effective tool for flood mapping during disaster response. Due to the complexity of high-density urban structures, high-resolution (HR) optical images can only extract visible floods in open spaces, and floods in shadows and under the canopy are challenging to map. Accurate digital elevation models (DEMs) are essential for inundation estimation towards urban flood mapping, but HR DEMs are often unavailable due to the high acquisition costs. Through DEM upscaling, HR DEMs could be obtained from existing low-resolution (LR) DEMs using deep learning. To this end, a novel multi-sensory HR urban flood mapping framework is proposed in this research. The framework consists of three components: 1) a new DEM upscaling network to infer HR DEMs from existing LR DEMs with a fusion approach, 2) a rapid flood segmentation network to extract visible flood from very-high-resolution (VHR) optical images with limited human labelling, and 3) an accurate Geographical Information System (GIS)-based tool for floodwater extent and depth estimation from the visible flood information along with HR DEMs. The proposed framework was validated on a fluvial flood that occurred in Calgary, Canada, in 2013, where the proposed DEM upscaling network produced an upscaled HR DEM at 2 m resolution from an existing LR DEM at 18 m resolution. In addition, the proposed flood segmentation network has shown accurate visible flood extraction from VHR RGB aerial imagery with over 80% intersection-over-union using 10% of human labelling as training samples. Finally, the floodwater extent and floodwater depth estimation using the proposed GIS tool showed significant improvement over conventional flood mapping methods.

Maxim Fortin

Water Resources Engineer

My professional interests include hydrological and hydraulic modeling, flood mapping and geospatial data analysis.