Parcel-Level Flood and Drought Detection for Insurance Using Sentinel-2A, Sentinel-1 SAR GRD and Mobile Images

Floods and droughts cause catastrophic damage in paddy fields, and farmers need to be compensated for their loss. Mobile applications have allowed farmers to claim losses by providing mobile photos and polygons of their land plots drawn on satellite base maps. This paper studies diverse methods to verify those claims at a parcel level by employing (i) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and (ii) Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) on Sentinel-2A images, (iii) Classification and Regression Tree (CART) on Sentinel-1 SAR GRD images, and (iv) a convolutional neural network (CNN) on mobile photos. To address the disturbance from clouds, we study the combination of multi-modal methods—NDVI+CNN and NDWI+CNN—that allow 86.21% and 83.79% accuracy in flood detection and 73.40% and 81.91% in drought detection, respectively. The SAR-based method outperforms the other methods in terms of accuracy in flood (98.77%) and drought (99.44%) detection, data acquisition, parcel coverage, cloud disturbance, and observing the area proportion of disasters in the field. The experiments conclude that the method of CART on SAR images is the most reliable to verify farmers’ claims for compensation. In addition, the CNN-based method’s performance on mobile photos is adequate, providing an alternative for the CART method in the case of data unavailability while using SAR images.