Automating global landslide detection with heterogeneous ensemble deep-learning classification

With changing climatic conditions, we are already seeing an increase in extreme weather events and their secondary consequences, including landslides. Landslides threaten infrastructure, including roads, railways, buildings, and human life. Hazard-based spatial planning and early warning systems are cost-effective strategies to reduce the risk to society from landslides. However, these both rely on data from previous landslide events, which is often scarce. Many deep learning (DL) models have recently been applied for landslide mapping using medium-to high-resolution satellite images as input. However, they often suffer from sensitivity problems, overfitting, and low mapping accuracy. This study addresses some of these limitations by using a diverse global landslide dataset, using different segmentation models, such as Unet, Linknet, PSP-Net, PAN, and DeepLab and based on their performances, building an ensemble model. The ensemble model achieved the highest F1-score (0.69) when combining both Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 bands, with the highest average improvement of 6.87 % when the ensemble size was 20. On the other hand, Sentinel-2 bands performed well, with an F1 score of 0.61 only when the ensemble size is 20 with an improvement of 14.59 %. This result shows considerable potential in building a robust and reliable monitoring system to minimise landslide hazards by building the ensemble globally trained system based on changes in vegetation index dNDVI only. [Display omitted] •Building a heterogeneous ensemble of models substantially improves the prediction performance.•Ensemble learning methods reduced the uncertainty of the single models' results.•The best result is achieved by using S1 & S2 only data (F1 = 0,66).•Biggest improvement Setting 2 dNDVI + Landcover (S2 bands) ensemble model increase from 0.52 to 0.61.•Possibility of creating a monitoring system based only on Setting 2 (dNDVI & land cover classification.