Assessment of a new GeoAI foundation model for floodinundation mapping

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Abstract

Vision foundation models are a new frontier in GeoAI research because of their potential to enable powerful image analysis by analyzing and extracting important image features from vast amounts of geospatial data. This paper evaluates the performance of the first-of-its-kind geospatial foundation model, IBM-NASA’s Prithvi, to support a crucial geospatial analysis task: flood inundation mapping. This model is compared with popular convolutional neural networks and vision transformer-based architectures regarding mapping accuracy for flooded areas. A benchmark dataset, Sen1Floods11, is used in the experiments, and the models' predictability, generalizability, and transferability are evaluated based on both validation datasets and datasets completely unseen by the model. Results show the impressive transferability of the Prithvi model, highlighting its performance advantages in segmenting flooded areas in previously unseen regions. The findings also suggest areas for improvement for the Prithvi model in adopting multi-scale representation learning, developing more end-to-end pipelines for high-level image analysis tasks, and offering more flexibility in allowable input data bands.
Publication type Conference Paper
Publication Subtype Conference Paper
Title Assessment of a new GeoAI foundation model for floodinundation mapping
DOI 10.1145/3615886.3627747
Year Published 2023
Language English
Publisher Association for Computing Machinery
Contributing office(s) Center for Geospatial Information Science (CEGIS)
Description 8 p.
Larger Work Type Book
Larger Work Subtype Conference publication
Larger Work Title Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on AI for Geographic Knowledge Discovery (GeoAI '23)
First page 102
Last page 109
Conference Title 6th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on AI for Geographic Knowledge Discovery (GeoAI '23)
Conference Location Hamburg Germany
Conference Date November 13, 2023
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