Geometrical feature analysis and disaster assessment of the Xinmo landslide based on remote sensing data

At 5:39 am on June 24, 2017, a landslide occurred in the village of Xinmo in Maoxian County, Aba Tibet and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture(Sichuan Province, Southwest China). On June 25, aerial images were acquired from an unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV), and a digital elevation model(DEM) was processed. Landslide geometrical features were then analyzed. These are the front and rear edge elevation, accumulation area and horizontal sliding distance. Then, the volume and the spatial distribution of the thickness of the deposit were calculated from the difference between the DEM available before the landslide, and the UAV-derived DEM collected after the landslide. Also, the disaster was assessed using high-resolution satellite images acquired before the landslide. These include Quick Bird, Pleiades-1 and GF-2 images with spatial resolutions of 0.65 m, 0.70 m, and 0.80 m, respectively, and the aerial images acquired from the UAV after the landslide with a spatial resolution of 0.1 m. According to the analysis, the area of the landslide was 1.62 km2, and the volume of the landslide was 7.70 ± 1.46 million m3. The average thickness of the landslide accumulation was approximately 8 m. The landslide destroyed a total of 103 buildings. The area of destroyed farmlands was 2.53 ha, and the orchard area was reduced by 28.67 ha. A 2-km section of Songpinggou River was blocked and a 2.1-km section of township road No. 104 was buried. Constrained by the terrain conditions, densely populated and more economically developed areas in the upper reaches of the Minjiang River basin are mainly located in the bottom of the valleys. This is a dangerous area regarding landslide, debris flow and flash flood events Therefore, in mountainous, high-risk disaster areas, it is important to carefully select residential sites to avoid a large number of casualties.

Multi-block SSD based on small object detection for UAV railway scene surveillance

A method of multi-block Single Shot Multi Box Detector(SSD)based on small object detection is proposed to the railway scene of unmanned aerial vehicle surveillance.To address the limitation of small object detection,a multi-block SSD mechanism,which consists of three steps,is designed.First,the original input images are segmented into several overlapped patches.Second,each patch is separately fed into an SSD to detect the objects.Third,the patches are merged together through two stages.In the first stage,the truncated object of the sub-layer detection result is spliced.In the second stage,a sub-layer suppression and filtering algorithm applying the concept of non-maximum suppression is utilized to remove the overlapped boxes of sub-layers.The boxes that are not detected in the main-layer are retained.In addition,no sufficient labeled training samples of railway circumstance are available,thereby hindering the deployment of SSD.A two-stage training strategy leveraging to transfer learning is adopted to solve this issue.The deep learning model is preliminarily trained using labeled data of numerous auxiliaries,and then it is refined using only a few samples of railway scene.A railway spot in China,which is easily damaged by landslides,is investigated as a case study.Experimental results show that the proposed multi-block SSD method produces an overall accuracy of 96.6%and obtains an improvement of up to 9.2%compared with the traditional SSD.