Automatic recognition of active landslides by surface deformation and deep learning

Catastrophic landslides are generally evolved from potential active landslides, and early identification of active landslides over an extensive region is vital to effective prevention and control of disastrous landslides in urban areas. Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) has immense potential in mapping active landslides. However, artificial interpretation of InSAR measurements and manual recognition of active landslides are very laborious and time-consuming, with a relatively high missing and false alarms. That hinders the application of InSAR technique and the identification of active landslides in wide areas. Automatic recognition of active landslides has always been a great challenge and has been relatively rarely investigated by previous studies. This work establishes comprehensive identification indices of geoenvironmental, disaster-triggering, and surface deformation features. Moreover, it suggests a novel deep learning algorithm of SDeepFM to conduct automatic identification of active landslides across a vast and landslide-serious area of Hualong County. Some new viewpoints are suggested as follows. (1) The identification indices consist of disaster-controlling, disaster-inducing, and active deformation characteristics and are constructed in terms of the cause characteristics of active landslides. Thus, it can effectively decrease the false alarms of active landslide identification. (2) The proposed SDeepFM algorithm features a spatial-perception ability and can adequately extract and fuse the low-level and high-level semantic features. It outperforms the classification and regression tree (CART), multi-layer perceptron (MLP), convolutional neural network (CNN), and deep neural network (DNN) algorithms. The test accuracy attains 0.91, 99.73%, 90.21%, 0.92, 0.96, and 0.91 in F1-score, Accuracy, Precision, Recall, AUC, and Kappa, respectively. (3) A total of 164 active landslides are exactly recognized, and 39 active landslides are newly identified in this work. (4) In Hualong County, the characteristics of slope deformation, spatial context, lithology, tectonic movement, human activity, and topography play important roles in active landslide identification. River distribution and rainfall also contribute to active landslide recognition.