Topology-Informed Neural Networks for Flood Detection in Optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery
This research proposes a neural network method incorporating topological data analysis to improve flood detection accuracy and interpretability. Using the SEN12-FLOOD dataset, topological features extracted from images are integrated into neural networks, demonstrating that topological descriptors carry meaningful flood signals independently and enhance the robustness and interpretability of existing networks.
[2606.26204] Topology-Informed Neural Networks for Flood Detection in Optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery
[Submitted on 24 Jun 2026]
Title:Topology-Informed Neural Networks for Flood Detection in Optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery
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Abstract:Floods frequently impact regions around the world. Rapid and accurate flood detection is crucial for emergency response and timely mitigation of human and economic loss. The expanding availability of satellite data and advances in artificial intelligence have enhanced monitoring of environmental hazards, but many flood events remain challenging to detect because cloud cover obscures optical satellite imagery. Rambour et al. introduced the SEN12-FLOOD dataset and extracted per-image features using a ResNet-50 convolutional neural network backbone, then fed these features into a gated recurrent unit network to show that temporal information can substantially improve accuracy compared to single-image baselines. More recently, Chamatidis et al. showed that a vision transformer can achieve strong performance with popular convolutional architectures. However, these models typically function as opaque black boxes, making it difficult to interpret their decision boundaries, learned features, and internal reasoning, especially in safety-critical domains like remote sensing. In contrast, topological data analysis (TDA) provides a mathematically grounded framework for capturing global structural features of data. TDA has emerged as a powerful tool for analyzing complex imagery, especially imagery with geometrically interpretable structures, of which floods are a prime candidate. In this work, we systematically evaluate topological descriptors for flood detection using the open-source SEN12-FLOOD dataset. By extracting topological features from each image and incorporating them into neural networks, we demonstrate that topological descriptors carry meaningful flood signals independently and complement existing networks to yield more robust and interpretable flood detection systems.
Subjects:
Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.26204 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2606.26204v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.26204
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Max Zhao [view email] [v1] Wed, 24 Jun 2026 16:52:28 UTC (241 KB)
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