Landslide intelligent prediction using object-oriented method

Landslides are one of the most serious geological disasters in the world and happen quite frequently in the Three Gorges. Landslide prediction is a very important measure of landslide prevention and cure in the Three Gorges. Traditional methods lack in sufficiently mining the various complex information from a landslide system. They often need much manual intervention and possess poor intelligence and accuracy. An intelligent method proposed in this paper for landslide prediction based on an object-oriented method and knowledge driving is hopeful to solve the above problem. The method adopted Landsat ETM+ images, 1:50,000 geological map and 1:10,000 relief map in the Three Gorges as the data origins. It firstly produced the key factors influencing landslide development and used multi-resolution segmentation algorithm to segment the image objects based on the key landslide factors of engineering rock group, reservoir water fluctuation, slope structure and slope level. Secondly, the method chose some sample objects and adopted the decision tree algorithm C5.0 to mine the landslide forecast criteria according to the factor values of each sample object. Finally, under knowledge driving the method classified the image objects and realized landslide susceptibility analysis and intelligent prediction in the Three Gorges. The method proposed in this paper is object-oriented. Results of a real-world example show that: (1) the object-oriented method possesses much more compact knowledge representation, higher efficiency, more continuous classifying result and higher prediction accuracy compared with the pixel-oriented method; (2) it possesses the overall accuracy of 87.64% and kappa coefficient of 0.8305 and is more accurate than the other seven methods (such as the pixel-oriented methods of Parallelpiped, Minimum Distance, Maximum Likelihood, Mahalanobis Distance, K-means and Isodata and the object-oriented method of Nearest Neighbor); (3) about 46.97% landslides lie in the high susceptibility region, 24.24% landslides lie in the moderate susceptibility region, 27.27% landslides lie in the low susceptibility region and 1.52% landslides lie in the very low susceptibility region. Therefore the method can effectively realize landslide susceptibility analysis and provides a new idea for landslide intelligent and accurate prediction. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.