Water Identification from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images Based on Multidimensional Densely Connected Convolutional Neural Networks

The accurate acquisition of water information from remote sensing images has become important in water resources monitoring and protections, and flooding disaster assessment. However, there are significant limitations in the traditionally used index for water body identification. In this study, we have proposed a deep convolutional neural network (CNN), based on the multidimensional densely connected convolutional neural network (DenseNet), for identifying water in the Poyang Lake area. The results from DenseNet were compared with the classical convolutional neural networks (CNNs): ResNet, VGG, SegNet and DeepLab v3+, and also compared with the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI). Results have indicated that CNNs are superior to the water index method. Among the five CNNs, the proposed DenseNet requires the shortest training time for model convergence, besides DeepLab v3+. The identification accuracies are evaluated through several error metrics. It is shown that the DenseNet performs much better than the other CNNs and the NDWI method considering the precision of identification results; among those, the NDWI performance is by far the poorest. It is suggested that the DenseNet is much better in distinguishing water from clouds and mountain shadows than other CNNs.