Flooding water depth estimation with high-resolution SAR

IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing

Volumn 53, Issue 5, 2015, Pages 2295-2307

  Iervolino, Pasquale ^a   Guida, Raffaella ^a   Iodice, Antonio ^b   Riccio, Daniele ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SURREY   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF NAPLES FEDERICO II   (Italy)

Author keywords

Electromagnetic modeling; feature extraction; floods; inverse problems; Synthetic aperture radar (SAR)

Indexed keywords

COMPUTATIONAL ELECTROMAGNETICS; FEATURE EXTRACTION; FLOODS; INVERSE PROBLEMS; INVERSE SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR; RADAR;

ELECTROMAGNETIC MODELING; HIGH RESOLUTION; HIGH-RESOLUTION SAR; SCATTERING MODEL; SINGLE IMAGES; SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR (SAR) IMAGES; URBAN AREAS; WATER DEPTH;

SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR;

ALGORITHM; DATA SET; DEPTH DETERMINATION; FLOODING; IMAGE RESOLUTION; MODEL TEST; MODEL VALIDATION; NEW RECORD; SATELLITE IMAGERY; SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR; TERRASAR-X; URBAN AREA; WATER DEPTH;

ENGLAND; GLOUCESTERSHIRE; UNITED KINGDOM;

EID: 84921064375     PISSN: 01962892     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2014.2358501     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. Environment Agency. (2010). The Cost of the Summer 2007 Floods in England, Rotherham, U.K., Available at: (Accessed: 15 May 2013). [Online]. Available: http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk
2. The Spatial Hazard Events and Losses Database for the United States, Hazards Research Lab., Columbia, SC, USA, 2013, Available at: (Accessed: 9 May 2013).
3. Directive 2007/60/EC of the European Parliament and Council of 23 October 2007 on the Assessment and Management of Flood Risks (Floods Directive), European Commission, Brussels, Belgium, 2007, Available at: (Accessed: 28 February 2014).
4. EnvironmentAgency. (2009).Flooding in England:A NationalAssessment of Flood Risk, Rotherham, U.K., Available at: (Accessed: 28 February 2014). [Online]. Available: http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk
5. V. Cançado, L. Brasil, N. Nascimento, and A. Guerra, "Flood risk assessment in an urban area: Measuring hazard and vulnerability," in Proc. 11th ICUD, Edinburgh, U.K., 2008, pp. 1-10.
6. Implementing of the Floods Directive, European Commission, Brussels, Belgium, 2013, Available at: (Accessed: 15 May 2013).
7. Handbook on Good Practices for Flood Mapping in Europe, European Commission, Brussels, Belgium, 2007, (Accessed: 15 May 2013). [Online]. Available: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/water/flood-risk/implem.htm
8. D. Yu and S. N. Lane, "Urban fluvial flood modelling using a twodimensional diffusion-wave treatment, Part I: Mesh resolution effects," Hydrol. Process., vol. 20, no. 7, pp. 1541-1565, Apr. 2006.
9. COSMO-SkyMed System Description and User Guide, e-Geos, Rome, Italy, 2013, Available at: (Accessed: 15 May 2013).
10. G. Krieger et al., "TanDEM-X: A satellite formation for high-resolution SAR interferometry," IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., vol. 45, no. 11, pp. 3317-3341, Nov. 2007.
11. A. Hillman et al., "RADARSAT-2 initial system operations and performance," in Proc. IEEE IGARSS, Cape Town, Africa, Jul. 2009, pp. II-753-II-756.
12. A. Panetti et al., "Sentinel-1 Spacecraft," in Proc. EUSAR, Berlin, Germany, Jun. 2014, pp. 4-7.
13. P. Matgen et al., "Towards an automated SAR-based flood monitoring system: Lessons learned from two case studies," Phys. Chem. Earth, vol. 36, no. 7/8, pp. 241-252, Mar. 2011.
14. V. Herrera-Cruz and F. Koudogbo, "TerraSAR-X rapid mapping for flood events," in Proc. ISPRS Workshop High-Resolution Earth Imaging Geospatial Inf., Hannover, Germany, 2009, pp. 170-175.
15. D. C. Mason et al., "Flood detection in urban areas using TerraSAR-X," IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 882-894, Feb. 2010.
16. D. C. Mason, I. J. Davenport, J. C. Neal, G. J. P. Schumann, and P. D. Bates, "Near real-time flood detection in urban and rural areas using high-resolution synthetic aperture radar images," IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., vol. 50, no. 8, pp. 3041-3052, Aug. 2012.
17. P. Iervolino, V. Diessa, A. Iodice, D. Riccio, and R. Guida, "A new local approach for flooding level estimation in urban areas using single SAR images," in Proc. Joint Urban Remote Sens. Event, Munich, Germany, Apr. 2011, pp. 257-260.
18. D. C. Mason, L. Giustarini, J. Garcia-Pintado, and H. L. Cloke, "Detection of flooded urban areas in high resolution synthetic aperture radar images using double scattering," Int. J. Appl. Earth Observ. Geoinf., vol. 28, pp. 150-159, May 2014.
19. L. Giustarini, R. Hostache, P. Matgen, G. J. P. Schuman, and P. D. Bates, "A change detection approach to flood mapping in urban areas using TerraSAR-X," IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 2417-2430, Apr. 2013.
20. S. G. Dellepiane and E. Agiati, "A new method for cross-normalization and multitemporal visualization of SAR images for detection of flooded areas," IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., vol. 50, no. 7, pp. 2765-2779, Jul. 2012.
21. G. R. Brakenridge, B. T. Tracy, and J. C. Knox, "Orbital SAR remote sensing of a river flood wave," Int. J. Remote Sens., vol. 19, no. 7, pp. 1439-1445, Jan. 1998.
22. C. Puech and D. Raclot, "Using geographical information systems and aerial photographs to determine water levels during floods," Hydrol. Process., vol. 16, no. 8, pp. 1593-1602, Jun. 2002.
23. J. Neal et al., "Evaluating a new LISFLOOD-FP formulation with data from the summer 2007 floods in Tewkesbury, U.K.," J. Flood Risk Manage., vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 88-95, Jun. 2011.
24. R. Hostache et al., "Water level estimation and reduction of hydraulic model calibration uncertainties using satellite SAR images of floods," IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 431-441, Feb. 2009.
25. G. J. P. Schuman, J. C. Neal, D. C. Mason, and P. D. Bates, "The accuracy of sequential aerial photography and SAR data for observing urban flood dynamics, a case study of UK summer 2007 floods," Remote Sens. Environ., vol. 115, no. 10, pp. 2536-2546, Oct. 2011.
26. G. Franceschetti, A. Iodice, and D. Riccio, "A canonical problem in electromagnetic backscattering from buildings," IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., vol. 40, no. 8, pp. 1787-1801, Aug. 2002.
27. R. Guida, A. Iodice, and D. Riccio, "Height retrieval of isolated buildings from single high-resolution SAR images," IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., vol. 48, no. 7, pp. 2967-2979, Jul. 2010.
28. G. Franceschetti and D. Riccio, Scattering, Natural Surfaces and Fractals., 1st ed. Burlington, MA, USA: Academic, 2007.
29. G. Franceschetti, A. Iodice, D. Riccio, and G. Ruello, "SAR raw signal simulation of urban structures," IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., vol. 41, no. 9, pp. 1986-1995, Sep. 2003.
30. A. J. Bennett and D. Blacknell, "The extraction of building dimensions from high resolution SAR imagery," in Proc. Int. Radar Conf., Huntsville, AL, USA, Sep. 2003, pp. 182-187.
31. M. Jahangir, D. Blacknell, C. P. Moate, and R. D. Hill, "Extracting information from shadows in SAR imagery," in Proc. ICMV, Dubai, UAE, Dec. 2007, pp. 107-112.
32. G. Di Martino, A. Iodice, D. Riccio, and G. Ruello, "Monitoring of flooding in urban areas," in Proc. Joint Urban Remote Sens. Event, Paris, France, Apr. 2007, pp. 1-5.
33. M. Watanabe, M. Matsumoto, M. Shimada, and M. Sato, "GB-SAR/ PiSAR simultaneous experiment for a trial of flood area detection," in Proc. IEEE IGARSS, Boston, MA, USA, Jul. 2008, pp. III-27-III-30.
34. H. Zwenzner and S. Voigt, "Improved estimation of flood parameters by combining space based SAR data with very high resolution digital elevation data," Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 567-576, May 2009.
35. S. Martinis, A. Twele, and S. Voigt, "Towards operational near real-time flood detection using a split-based automatic thresholding procedure on high resolution TerraSAR-X data," Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 303-314, Mar. 2009.
36. F. Ayoub, S. Leprince, and J. Avouac, "Co-registration and correlation of aerial photographs for ground deformation measurements," ISPRS J. Photogramm. Remote Sens., vol. 64, no. 6, pp. 551-560, May 2009.
37. H. E. Bussey et al., "International comparison of dielectric measurements," IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas., vol. IM-13, no. 4, pp. 305-311, Aug. 1964.
38. R. Guida, A. Iodice, D. Riccio, and U. Stilla, "Model-based interpretation of high-resolution SAR images of buildings," IEEE J. Sel. Topics Appl. Earth Observ. Remote Sens., vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 107-119, Jun. 2008.
39. T. Saarenketo, "Electrical properties of road materials and subgrade soils and the use of ground penetrating radar in traffic infrastructure surveys," Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. Oulu, Oulu, Finland, 2006.
40. F. T. Ulaby, R. K. Moore, and A. K. Fung, Microwave Remote Sensing-Active and Passive Volume III. North Bergen, NJ, USA: Artech House, 1990, (Reprint Edition).
41. R. Guida et al., "Building feature extraction via a deterministic approach: Application to real high resolution SAR images," in Proc. IEEE IGARSS, Barcelona, Spain, Jul. 2007, pp. 2681-2684.
42. P. T. B. Brett and R. Guida, "Bright line detection in COSMO-SkyMed SAR images of urban areas," in Proc. Joint Urban Remote Sens. Event, Munich, Germany, Apr. 2011, pp. 253-256.
43. P. T. B. Brett and R. Guida, "Earthquake damage detection in urban areas using curvilinear features," IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., vol. 51, no. 9, pp. 4877-4884, Sep. 2013.
44. R. Touzi, A. Lopes, J. Bruniquel, and P. W. Vachon, "Coherence estimation for SAR imagery," IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 135-149, Jan. 1999.
45. E. Rodriguez and J. M. Martin, "Theory and design of interferometric synthetic aperture radars," Proc. Inst. Elect. Eng. F-Radar Signal Process., vol. 139, no. 2, pp. 147-159, Apr. 1992.