Classification of Water Areas from Satellite Imagery Using Artificial Neural Networks

Every year, several typhoons hit the Korean peninsula and cause severe damage. For the prevention and accurate estimation of these damages, real time or almost real time flood information is essential. Because of weather conditions, images taken by optic sensors or LIDAR are sometimes not appropriate for an accurate estimation of water areas during typhoon. In this case SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) images which are independent of weather condition can be useful for the estimation of flood areas. To get detailed information about floods from satellite imagery, accurate classification of water areas is the most important step. A commonly- and widely-used classification methods is the ML(Maximum Likelihood) method which assumes that the distribution of brightness values of the images follows a Gaussian distribution. The distribution of brightness values of the SAR image, however, usually does not follow a Gaussian distribution. For this reason, in this study the ANN (Artificial Neural Networks) method independent of the statistical characteristics of images is applied to the SAR imagery. RADARS A TSAR images are primarily used for extraction of water areas, and DEM (Digital Elevation Model) is used as supplementary data to evaluate the ground undulation effect. Water areas are also extracted from KOMPSAT image achieved by optic sensors for comparison purpose. Both ANN and ML methods are applied to flat and mountainous areas to extract water areas. The estimated areas from satellite imagery are compared with those of manually extracted results. As a result, the ANN classifier performs better than the ML method when only the SAR image was used as input data, except for mountainous areas. When DEM was used as supplementary data for classification of SAR images, there was a 5.64% accuracy improvement for mountainous area, and a similar result of 0.24% accuracy improvement for flat areas using artificial neural networks.