River Area Segmentation Using Sentinel-1 SAR Imagery with Deep-Learning Approach

Abstract

River segmentation is important in delivering essential information for environmental analytics such as water management, flood/disaster management, observations of climate change, or human activities. Advances in remote-sensing technology have provided more complex features that limit the traditional approaches’ effectiveness. This work uses deep-learning-based models to enhance river extractions from satellite imagery. With Resnet-50 as the backbone network, CNN U-Net and DeepLabv3+ were utilized to perform the river segmentation of the Sentinel-1 C-Band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. The SAR data was selected due to its capability to capture surface details regardless of weather conditions, with VV+VH band polarizations being employed to improve water surface reflectivity. A total of 1080 images were utilized to train and test the models. The models’ performance was measured using the Dice coefficient. The CNN U-Net architecture achieved an accuracy of 0.94, while DeepLabv3+ attained an accuracy of 0.92. Although DeepLabv3+ showed more sta-bility during the training and performed better on wider rivers, CNN U-Net excelled at identifying narrow rivers. In conclusion, a river-segmentation model was conducted using Sentinel-1 C-Band SAR data, with CNN U-Net outperforming DeepLabv3+; this enabled detailed river mapping for irrigation- and flood-monitoring applications – particularly in cloud-prone tropical regions.