Multi-temporal segmentation of Cosmo-SkyMed SAR data for flood monitoring

The short revisit time that characterizes the COSMO-SkyMed mission makes possible the analysis of the evolution of flooding events from satellite radar data. A procedure to monitor an inundation event using multi-temporal COSMO-SkyMed imagery is presented in this paper. The dataset consists of five COSMO-SkyMed observations of a flood event occurred in Northern Italy in 2009. The procedure is principally based on an image segmentation technique, which allows identifying homogeneous regions in order to extract a reliable backscattering value, and on the use of an electromagnetic model to interpret the radar return from the image segments. The results demonstrate the potential and the utility of such a combined use of an electromagnetic scattering model and a segmentation algorithm for inundation monitoring. © 2011 IEEE