Title: Detection of Slump Slides on Earthen Levees Using Polarimetric SAR Imagery
Speaker: James Aanstoos, Senior Meteorology Lecturer, Iowa State University
Abstract: Earthen levees protect large areas of populated and cultivated land in the United States. One of the major concerns for levee managers is the detection and repair of small landslides caused by slope instability, which could lead to through seepage and erosion during high water events. This research focuses on automated detection of such slides on earthen levees using remotely sensed synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. Polarimetric SAR data with HH and VV polarizations is very effective for classification as it responds to different relevant target scattering characteristics. In this study, we analyze two SAR datasets: (1) X-band satellite-based radar data from the German Terrasar-X, and (2) L-band airborne radar data from NASA JPL’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR). The study area focuses on portions of the mainline levee system on the east side of the Mississippi river near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Using the available ground truth data, we tested a variety of feature types including textural features such wavelets and grey-level co-occurrence matrices (GLCM). Several supervised and unsupervised classifiers were tested including Support Vector Machine (SVM), artificial neural network using back propagation, K-means, and RXD anomaly detector. Preliminary test results of each method are presented.
Speaker Bio: Dr. Aanstoos is a Senior Lecturer in the Meteorology program of the Geological and Atmospheric Sciences Department at Iowa State University, and also holds a part-time appointment as Associate Research Professor of the Geosystems Research Institute (GRI) at Mississippi State University and an adjunct in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department there. His teaching duties focus on Remote Sensing and Radar Meteorology. His recent research activities include the application of synthetic aperture radar and multispectral imagery to levee vulnerability assessment, evaluation of soil moisture from active and passive microwave sensors, and satellite precipitation estimation.