MMFlood: A Multimodal Dataset for Flood Delineation from Satellite Imagery

Accurate flood delineation is crucial in many disaster management tasks, including, but not limited to: risk map production and update, impact estimation, claim verification, or planning of countermeasures for disaster risk reduction. Open remote sensing resources such as the data provided by the Copernicus ecosystem enable to carry out this activity, which benefits from frequent revisit times on a global scale. In the last decades, satellite imagery has been successfully applied to flood delineation problems, especially considering Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) signals. However, current remote mapping services rely on time-consuming manual or semi-automated approaches, requiring the intervention of domain experts. The implementation of accurate and scalable automated pipelines is hindered by the scarcity of large-scale annotated datasets.
To address these issues, we propose MMFlood, a multimodal remote sensing dataset purposely designed for flood delineation. The dataset contains 1748 Sentinel-1 acquisitions, comprising 95 flood events distributed across 42 countries. Together with satellite imagery, the dataset includes the Digital Elevation Model (DEM), hydrography maps, and flood delineation maps provided by Copernicus EMS, which is considered as ground truth.
We release MMFlood, comparing its relevance with similar earth observation datasets. Moreover, to set baseline performances, we conduct an extensive benchmark of the flood delineation task using state-of-art deep learning models, and we evaluate the performance gains of entropy-based sampling and multi-encoder architectures, which are respectively used to tackle two of the main challenges posed by MMFlood, namely the class unbalance and the multimodal setting.