Surface water mapping of remote sensing data using pre-trained fully convolutional network

Surface water mapping has been widely used in various remote sensing applications. Water indices have been commonly used to distinguish water bodies from land; however, determining the optimal threshold and discriminating water bodies from similar objects such as shadows and snow is difficult. Deep learning algorithms have greatly advanced image segmentation and classification. In particular, FCN (Fully Convolutional Network) is state-of-the-art in per-pixel image segmentation and are used in most benchmarks such as PASCAL VOC2012 and Microsoft COCO (Common Objects in Context). However, these data sets are designed for daily scenarios and a few studies have conducted on applications of FCN using large scale remotely sensed data set. This paper aims to fine-tune the pre-trained FCN network using the CRMS (Coastwide Reference Monitoring System) data set for surface water mapping. The CRMS provides color infrared aerial photos and ground truth maps for the monitoring and restoration of wetlands in Louisiana, USA. To effectively learn the characteristics of surface water, we used pre-trained the DeepWaterMap network, which classifies water, land, snow, ice, clouds, and shadows using Landsat satellite images. Furthermore, the DeepWaterMap network was fine-tuned for the CRMS data set using two classes: water and land. The fine-tuned network finally classifies surface water without any additional learning process. The experimental results show that the proposed method enables high-quality surface mapping from CRMS data set and show the suitability of pre-trained FCN networks using remote sensing data for surface water mapping.