Towards transparent deep learning for surface water detection from SAR imagery

• Published in: International journal of applied earth observation and geoinformation Vol. 118; p. 103287
• Main Authors: Chen, Lifu, Cai, Xingmin, Xing, Jin, Li, Zhenhong, Zhu, Wu, Yuan, Zhihui, Fang, Zhenhuan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.04.2023; Elsevier
• Subjects: Attribution Visualization; Deep Learning; SAR Image Analytics; Water Detection; XAI; SAR Image Analytics; XAI; Attribution Visualization; Water Detection; Deep Learning
• ISSN: 1569-8432; 1872-826X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jag.2023.103287

•Proposing the first explainable DNN for SAR-based water detection.•Inventing a new attribution analytics method within DNN.•Presenting a geo-visualization module to generate heatmaps.•Performance assessment using Millimeter-wave and Sentinel-1 SAR data. Water detection from SAR imagery has significant values, such as the flood monitoring and environmental protection. Nowadays, significant progress has been achieved in water detection using deep neural network (DNN) methods, but the blackbox behavior incurs many doubts in the performance of deep learning techniques, which undermines its trustworthiness in water detection from SAR imagery. By integrating SAR domain knowledge, DNN and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), an explainable DNN framework for surface water detection is proposed for the first time. This framework includes three parts: the water extraction network containing four backbone networks, the Local and Global Mixed Attribution (LGMA) module for performance evaluation of backbone network, and the Semantic Specific-class Activation Mapping (SSAM) module, which performs geo-visualization for the output layers of high-level features. In the experiment, SAR images from different resolutions and frequency-bands are utilized, which are from millimeter-wave and Sentinel-1 systems. The attribution maps and heatmaps of four backbone networks are assessed towards the final water extraction results. The experiment indicates that the proposed framework can glass-box the decision-making process of DNN in water detection and offer corresponding attribution analytics for given input SAR imagery. This work encourages other scholars to conduct extensive research on the explanation of DNN in SAR domain, gradually establish the trustworthiness of DNN, and promote the development of DNN in SAR images analytics.