Semi-Supervised Multi-Temporal Deep Representation Fusion Network for Landslide Mapping from Aerial Orthophotos

Using remote sensing techniques to monitor landslides and their resultant land cover changes is fundamentally important for risk assessment and hazard prevention. Despite enormous efforts in developing intelligent landslide mapping (LM) approaches, LM remains challenging owing to high spectral heterogeneity of very-high-resolution (VHR) images and the daunting labeling efforts. To this end, a deep learning model based on semi-supervised multi-temporal deep representation fusion network, namely SMDRF-Net, is proposed for reliable and efficient LM. In comparison with previous methods, the SMDRF-Net possesses three distinct properties. (1) Unsupervised deep representation learning at the pixel- and object-level is performed by transfer learning using the Wasserstein generative adversarial network with gradient penalty to learn discriminative deep features and retain precise outlines of landslide objects in the high-level feature space. (2) Attention-based adaptive fusion of multi-temporal and multi-level deep representations is developed to exploit the spatio-temporal dependencies of deep representations and enhance the feature representation capability of the network. (3) The network is optimized using limited samples with pseudo-labels that are automatically generated based on a comprehensive uncertainty index. Experimental results from the analysis of VHR aerial orthophotos demonstrate the reliability and robustness of the proposed approach for LM in comparison with state-of-the-art methods.

Automated summary

By utilizing the deep learning model SMDRF-Net, which combines unsupervised learning and attention mechanisms, the reliable and efficient identification of landslides in multi-temporal remote sensing images has been achieved, thus enhancing the feature representation capability of the network.