[Incomplete] "Current ML techniques in Landslide Detection & Prediction"

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Category : Notes


Notes from ‘A dual-encoder U-Net for landslide deetection using Sentinel-2 and DEM data.

What are they doing:

  • Semantic Segmentation: (A per-pixel classification) Landslide prediction.
  • A duel-encoder architecture that use both
  • Workflow to construct the landslide dataset???

Good for us:

  • They claim that the popularly used models are U-Net, Attention U-Net and Seg-Net (Which is still a little outdated) We can definitely develop a more landslide-science based model.

Bad for us:

Datasets Available: Semantic Segmentation Dataset: Google Earth images of 2.39m spatial resolution in Jinsha River basin and corresponding per-pixel annotations.

Iburi Landslide Dataset - Check out the original paper for data description.

Take-aways:

  • Since this paper is very recent (Published last week lol) we can rely on the related work section to a bit to understand background work so far.

There are majorly 5 methods used - ‘Visual Representation’ Example, ‘Change Detection-based’, ‘Knowledge-based’, ‘ML based’ and ‘DL based’.

Most ML methods (like SVMs, random forest, logistic regression, bayesian classifier and DST) have already been tried out but the issue is the high requirement for data preprocessing and feature engineering.

DL methods are majorly object-detection (using bounding boxes to locate landslides in a given image) and segmentation based (classifying pixel by pixel as landslide or not-landslide).

DL Object-detection (R-CNNs, Mask R-CNNs, YOLOs + Attention). Drawback: These only give a rectangular box around the landslide and not the exact boundary of the landslide.

DL Segmentation (FCN, U-Net, GCN, DeepLab on River Landslide dataset & LandsNet for Earthquake-triggered landslide detection)

Next Steps:

Run RCNN on Instance Segmentation. Define variations on RCNN architecture for Instance Segmentation. Take out YOLO v8 model (More YOLO models as well) from the official package and run it on our data (for 7 bands or more)

About Vihaan Akshaay

I am an Applied AI Researcher with first-author publications at top-tier venues, including ICLR 2025 and NeurIPS 2023, in Computer Vision and Deep Reinforcement Learning. My work spans five research internships across premier institutions, including The Jackson Laboratory (JAX), IIT Madras, Georgia Tech, NTU Singapore, and a joint role at UC Santa Barbara and Carnegie Mellon University.

My research bridges disciplines—developing AI systems for biological behavior analysis, robotics, mechanical systems, and Earth sciences. At IIT Madras, I led the iBot Robotics Club and co-developed the ARTEMIS Railroad Crack Detection Robot, winning the International James Dyson Award. My Master’s thesis on unsupervised behavior recognition in mice was advised by B. Ravindran and Dr. Vivek Kumar at JAX.

I recently completed my M.S. in Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, working under Lei Li and Yu-Xiang Wang. Inspired by human problem-solving strategies, I proposed a bi-directional framework for goal conditioning in state-space search. I also introduced an edge-attention-based U-Net for environmental segmentation and helped curate a large-scale landslide detection dataset with Gen Li using 40 years of Landsat imagery.

Other projects include analyzing the stability of Deep Q-Networks with Siva Theja Maguluri at Georgia Tech and designing kernelized deep randomized models (eDRVFLs) with P. N. Suganthan at NTU Singapore.

I specialize in translating cutting-edge AI theory into practical, high-impact solutions across domains. I am currently seeking opportunities in applied AI research or machine learning engineering roles, particularly those focused on impactful, real-world applications.

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