UNet Combined With Attention Mechanism Method for Extracting Flood Submerged Range

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite has been widely applied in real-time flood monitoring as that they are not affected by extreme weather conditions. However, there is no automatic method to quickly and accurately extract flood areas with SAR satellite images. In this article, a UNet combined with the attention mechanism (UNet-CBAM) method has been proposed for extracting flood submerged areas, and both Longgan Lake and Dahuchi in Poyang Lake Basin are selected as the test sites. Based on the polarization characteristics of two Sentinel-1A data of Poyang Lake, both UNet and UNet-CBAM extraction methods are utilized to extract the flood areas, respectively. Compared with traditional SAR image water extraction methods, simulation results demonstrate that UNet can obtain more satisfactory results in recall, precision, and ${F}_1$-parameter, but it has no capability to guarantee continuity in edges and small bodies of water. Moreover, our proposed UNet-CBAM method can further improve recall, precision, and ${F}_1$-parameter, respectively. Specifically, when compared with UNet, its recall is increased by 0.8% and 1.2% while ${F}_1$-parameter is improved by 0.6% and 0.8%, respectively, in the two test sites.

Keywords

• Attention mechanism
• flood area extraction
• flood monitoring
• synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
• UNet