Flooded Area Segmentation from UAV Images Based on Generative Adversarial Networks

The detection, localization and evaluation of small flooded areas can contribute to decrease the economical damages of such disasters. The cheapest and most accurate method is to segment the aerial images taken from UAV. In this paper, we propose a new method for detection of regions of interest, like flooding in rural areas, using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and Graphics Processing Units (GPU). The classical GPU is used to create, by parallel calculation of textural features, extracted from the co-occurrence matrix, the supervised mask of flood segmentation in the images from the learning set. Based on these images and their associated real masks, the weights of the generator and discriminator are established. A set of 40 images were used for the learning phase and another set of 60 images were used for method validation. The results demonstrate that the proposed method provide a high accuracy and robustness, comparing with other papers for flooding evaluation. Even if it is a relative long time to learn the GAN, in the operational phase the time for image segmentation process is very short.