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Title: Flood Inundation Mapping with Limited Observations Based on Physics-Aware Topography Constraint
Spatial classification with limited observations is important in geographical applications where only a subset of sensors are deployed at certain spots or partial responses are collected in field surveys. For example, in observation-based flood inundation mapping, there is a need to map the full flood extent on geographic terrains based on earth imagery that partially covers a region. Existing research mostly focuses on addressing incomplete or missing data through data cleaning and imputation or modeling missing values as hidden variables in the EM algorithm. These methods, however, assume that missing feature observations are rare and thus are ineffective in problems whereby the vast majority of feature observations are missing. To address this issue, we recently proposed a new approach that incorporates physics-aware structural constraint into the model representation. We design efficient learning and inference algorithms. This paper extends our recent approach by allowing feature values of samples in each class to follow a multi-modal distribution. Evaluations on real-world flood mapping applications show that our approach significantly outperforms baseline methods in classification accuracy, and the multi-modal extension is more robust than our early single-modal version. Computational experiments show that the proposed solution is computationally efficient on large datasets.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2008973 1850546 2207072 2147908
NSF-PAR ID:
10283517
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Frontiers in Big Data
Volume:
4
ISSN:
2624-909X
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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