This paper addresses the problem of floods classification and floods aftermath detection utilizing both social media and satellite imagery. Automatic detection of disasters such as floods is still a very challenging task. The focus lies on identifying passable routes or roads during floods. Two novel solutions are presented, which were developed for two corresponding tasks at the MediaEval 2018 benchmarking challenge. The tasks are (i) identification of images providing evidence for road passability and (ii) differentiation and detection of passable and non-passable roads in images from two complementary sources of information. For the first challenge, we mainly rely on object and scene-level features extracted through multiple deep models pre-trained on the ImageNet and Places datasets. The object and scene-level features are then combined using early, late and double fusion techniques. To identify whether or not it is possible for a vehicle to pass a road in satellite images, we rely on Convolutional Neural Networks and a transfer learning-based classification approach. The evaluation of the proposed methods are carried out on the large-scale datasets provided for the benchmark competition. The results demonstrate significant improvement in the performance over the recent state-of-art approaches.
Being able to automatically link social media and satellite imagery holds large opportunities for research, with a potentially considerable impact on society. The possibility of integrating different information sources opens in fact to new scenarios where the wide coverage of satellite imaging can be used as a collector of the fine-grained details provided by the social media. Remote-sensed data and social media data can well complement each other, integrating the wide perspective provided by the satellite view with the information collected locally, being it textual, audio, or visual. Among the possible applications, natural disasters are certainly one of the most interesting scenarios, where global and local perspectives are needed at the same time. In this paper, we present a system called JORD that is able to autonomously collect social media data (including the text analysis in local languages) about technological and environmental disasters, and link it automatically to remote-sensed data. Moreover, in order to ensure the quality of retrieved information, JORD is equipped with a hierarchical filtering mechanism relying on the temporal information and the content analysis of retrieved multimedia data. To show the capabilities of the system, we present a large number of disaster events detected by the system, and we evaluate both the quality of the provided information about the events and the usefulness of JORD from potential users viewpoint, using crowdsourcing. Being able to automatically link social media information and data to remote-sensed data holds large possibilities for society and research. In this paper, we present a system called JORD that is able to autonomously collect social media data about technological and environmental disasters, and link it automatically to remote-sensed data. In addition, we demonstrate that queries in local languages that are relevant to the exact position of natural disasters retrieve more accurate information about a disaster event. To show the capabilities of the system, we present some examples of disaster events detected by the system. To evaluate the quality of the provided information and usefulness of JORD from the potential users point of view we include a crowdsourced user study. Abstract Geological disaster recognition, especially, landslide recognition, is of vital importance in disaster prevention, disaster monitoring and other applications. As more and more optical remote sensing images are available in recent years, landslide recognition on optical remote sensing images is in demand. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a deep learning based landslide recognition method for optical remote sensing images. In order to capture more distinct features hidden in landslide images, a particular wavelet transformation is proposed to be used as the preprocessing method. Next, a corrupting & denoising method is proposed to enhance the robustness of the model in recognize landslide features. Then, a deep auto-encoder network with multiple hidden layers is proposed to learn the high-level features and representations of each image. A softmax classifier is used for class prediction. Experiments are conducted on the remote sensing images from Google Earth. The experimental results indicate that the proposed wav DAE method outperforms the state-of-the-art classifiers both in efficiency and accuracy. ABSTRACT Klemas, V., 2015. Remote sensing of floods and flood-prone areas: An overview. River floods and coastal storm surges affect the lives of more people than most other weather-related disaste... Analysis of satellite images plays an increasingly vital role in environment and climate monitoring, especially in detecting and managing natural disaster. In this paper, we proposed an automatic disaster detection system by implementing one of the advance deep learning techniques, convolutional neural network (CNN), to analysis satellite images. The neural network consists of 3 convolutional layers, followed by max-pooling layers after each convolutional layer, and 2 fully connected layers. We created our own disaster detection training data patches, which is currently focusing on 2 main disasters in Japan and Thailand: landslide and flood. Each disaster's training data set consists of 30000∼40000 patches and all patches are trained automatically in CNN to extract region where disaster occurred instantaneously. The results reveal accuracy of 80 ∼90 for both disaster detection. The results presented here may facilitate improvements in detecting natural disaster efficiently by establishing automatic disaster detection system.