An Integrated Image Classification Approach to Detect the Flood Prone Areas using Sentinel-1 Images

The untimely monsoon floods and the rise in the level of rivers in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) is a major challenge for coordinating relief and rescue operations. To address this challenge, the experts that are deploying a variety of techniques to evaluate the damages might get useful information from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images which offer images in close to real-time. The Sentinel-1A satellite images from the European Space Agency provide C-band SAR images that have helped researchers achieve enhanced processes of flood detection and flood mapping in flood-prone areas. In regular cases, the Random Forest (RF) and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) supervised classification techniques provide higher accuracies than the unsupervised K-Means classification techniques. The integrated approach with the resultant accuracy provides long-reliable elucidation towards flood damages and assessment control. Thenceforth, the RF and KNN supervised classifications based outcomes were integrated with the outcomes of K-Means iterative clustering unsupervised classification producing an enhanced overall accuracy. The overall accuracy from the integrated approach for the city of Basti and Ayodhya is 97% and 93.8% which is higher than the accuracies derived from the supervised and unsupervised classifications. Further, these processed results when refined by time-series analysis over a number of years along with implementing change detection techniques would help in monitoring the flood situation and undertaking precautionary measures.