Sentinel 1a-2a Incorporating an Object-Based Image Analysis Method for Flood Mapping and Extent Assessment

Abstract

This study presents flood extent extraction and mapping from Sentinel images. Here we suggest an algorithm for extracting flooded areas from object-based image analysis (OBIA) using Sentinel-1A and Sentinel-2A images to map and assess the flood extent from the beginning to one week after the event. This study used multi-scale parameters in OBIA for image segmentation. First, we identified the flooded regions by applying our proposed algorithm on the Sentinel-1A. Then, to evaluate the effects of the flood on each land-use/land cover (LULC) class, Sentinel-2A images is classified using the OBIA after the event. Besides, we also used the threshold method to compare the proposed algorithm applying OBIA to determine the efficiency in computing parameters for change detection and flood extent mapping. The findings revealed the best performance for the segmentation process with an Object Fitness Index (OFI) is 0.92 when the scale parameter of 60 is applied. The results also show that 2099.4 km2 of the study area is flooded at the beginning of the flood. Furthermore, we found that the most flooded LULC classes are agricultural land and orchards with 695.28km2 (32.4%) and 708.63 km2 (33.7%), respectively. In comparison, about 33.9% of the remaining flooded area has occurred in other classes (i.e., fish farm, built-up, bare land and water bodies). The resulting object of each scale parameter was evaluated by Object Pureness Index (OPI), Object Matching Index (OMI), and OFI. Finally, our Overall Accuracy (OA) method incorporated field data using the Global Positioning System (GPS) shows 93%, 90%, and 89% for LULC, flood map (i.e., using our proposed algorithm), and threshold method, respectively.