Deep learning models for river classification at sub-meter resolutions from multispectral and panchromatic commercial satellite imagery

Remote sensing of the Earth’s surface water is critical in a wide range of environmental studies, from evaluating the societal impacts of seasonal droughts and floods to the large-scale implications of climate change. Consequently, a large literature exists on the classification of water from satellite imagery. Yet, previous methods have been limited by (1) the >10 m spatial resolution of public satellite imagery, (2) classification schemes that operate at the pixel level, and (3) the need for multiple spectral bands. We advance the state-of-the-art by (1) using commercial satellite imagery with panchromatic and multispectral resolutions of ∼ 30 cm and ∼ 1.2 m, respectively, (2) developing multiple fully convolutional neural networks (FCN) that can learn the morphological features of water bodies in addition to their spectral properties, and (3) FCN that can classify water even from panchromatic imagery. This study focuses on rivers in the Arctic, using images from the Quickbird-2, WorldView-1, WorldView-2, WorldView-3, and GeoEye satellites. Because no training data are available at such high resolutions, we construct those manually. First, we use the red, green, blue, and near-infrared bands of the 8-band multispectral sensors. Those trained models all achieve excellent precision and recall over 90% on validation data, aided by on-the-fly preprocessing of the training data specific to satellite imagery. In a novel approach, we then use results from the multispectral model to generate training data for FCN that only require panchromatic imagery, of which considerably more is available. Despite the smaller feature space, these models still achieve a precision and recall of over 85%. We provide our open-source codes and trained model parameters to the remote sensing community, which paves the way to a wide range of environmental hydrology applications at vastly superior accuracies and 1–2 orders of magnitude higher spatial resolution than previously possible.