Improving landslide prediction by computer vision and deep learning

The destructive power of a landslide can seriously affect human beings and infrastructures. The prediction of this phenomenon is of great interest; however, it is a complex task in which traditional methods have limitations. In recent years, Artificial Intelligence has emerged as a successful alternative in the geological field. Most of the related works use classical machine learning algorithms to correlate the variables of the phenomenon and its occurrence. This requires large quantitative landslide datasets, collected and labeled manually, which is costly in terms of time and effort. In this work, we create an image dataset using an official landslide inventory, which we verified and updated based on journalistic information and interpretation of satellite images of the study area. The images cover the landslide crowns and the actual triggering values of the conditioning factors at the detail level (5 × 5 pixels). Our approach focuses on the specific location where the landslide starts and its proximity, unlike other works that consider the entire landslide area as the occurrence of the phenomenon. These images correspond to geological, geomorphological, hydrological and anthropological variables, which are stacked in a similar way to the channels of a conventional image to feed and train a convolutional neural network. Therefore, we improve the quality of the data and the representation of the phenomenon to obtain a more robust, reliable and accurate prediction model. The results indicate an average accuracy of 97.48%, which allows the generation of a landslide susceptibility map on the Aloag-Santo Domingo highway in Ecuador. This tool is useful for risk prevention and management in this area where small, medium and large landslides occur frequently.