Multitemporal Water Extraction of Dongting Lake and Poyang Lake Based on an Automatic Water Extraction and Dynamic Monitoring Framework

Abstract

Timely and accurate large-scale water body mapping and dynamic monitoring are of great significance for water resource planning, flood control, and disaster reduction applications. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems have the characteristics of strong operability, wide coverage, and all-weather data availability, and play a key role in large-scale water monitoring applications. However, there are still some challenges in the application of highly efficient, high-precision water extraction and dynamic monitoring methods. In this paper, a framework for the automatic extraction and long-term change monitoring of water bodies is proposed. First, a multitemporal water sample dataset is produced based on the bimodal threshold segmentation method. Second, attention block and pyramid module are introduced into the UNet (encoder-decoder) model to construct a robust water extraction network (PA-UNet). Then, GIS modeling is used for the automatic postprocessing of the water extraction results. Finally, the results are mapped and statistically analyzed. The whole process realizes end-to-end input and output. Sentinel-1 data covering Dongting Lake and Poyang Lake are selected for water extraction and dynamic monitoring analysis from 2017 to 2020, and Sentinel-2 images from a similar time frame are selected for verification. The results show that the proposed framework can realize high-precision (the extraction accuracy is higher than 95%), highly efficient automatic water extraction. Multitemporal monitoring results show that Dongting Lake and Poyang Lake fluctuate most in April, July, and November in 2017, 2019, and 2020, and the change trends of the two lakes are the same.