Andreas Karavias

Nikolaos Ioannis Bountos, Ioannis Papoutsis, Dimitrios Michail et al.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data and Interferometric SAR (InSAR) products in particular, are one of the largest sources of Earth Observation data. InSAR provides unique information on diverse geophysical processes and geology, and on the geotechnical properties of man-made structures. However, there are only a limited number of applications that exploit the abundance of InSAR data and deep learning methods to extract such knowledge. The main barrier has been the lack of a large curated and annotated InSAR dataset, which would be costly to create and would require an interdisciplinary team of experts experienced on InSAR data interpretation. In this work, we put the effort to create and make available the first of its kind, manually annotated dataset that consists of 19,919 individual Sentinel-1 interferograms acquired over 44 different volcanoes globally, which are split into 216,106 InSAR patches. The annotated dataset is designed to address different computer vision problems, including volcano state classification, semantic segmentation of ground deformation, detection and classification of atmospheric signals in InSAR imagery, interferogram captioning, text to InSAR generation, and InSAR image quality assessment.

Nikolaos Ioannis Bountos, Maria Sdraka, Angelos Zavras et al.

Global floods, exacerbated by climate change, pose severe threats to human life, infrastructure, and the environment. Recent catastrophic events in Pakistan and New Zealand underscore the urgent need for precise flood mapping to guide restoration efforts, understand vulnerabilities, and prepare for future occurrences. While Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) remote sensing offers day-and-night, all-weather imaging capabilities, its application in deep learning for flood segmentation is limited by the lack of large annotated datasets. To address this, we introduce Kuro Siwo, a manually annotated multi-temporal dataset, spanning 43 flood events globally. Our dataset maps more than 338 billion $m^2$ of land, with 33 billion designated as either flooded areas or permanent water bodies. Kuro Siwo includes a highly processed product optimized for flood mapping based on SAR Ground Range Detected, and a primal SAR Single Look Complex product with minimal preprocessing, designed to promote research on the exploitation of both the phase and amplitude information and to offer maximum flexibility for downstream task preprocessing. To leverage advances in large scale self-supervised pretraining methods for remote sensing data, we augment Kuro Siwo with a large unlabeled set of SAR samples. Finally, we provide an extensive benchmark, namely BlackBench, offering strong baselines for a diverse set of flood events from Europe, America, Africa, Asia and Australia.

Nadiia Kopiika, Andreas Karavias, Pavlos Krassakis et al.

Critical infrastructure, such as transport networks and bridges, are systematically targeted during wars and suffer damage during extensive natural disasters because it is vital for enabling connectivity and transportation of people and goods, and hence, underpins national and international economic growth. Mass destruction of transport assets, in conjunction with minimal or no accessibility in the wake of natural and anthropogenic disasters, prevents us from delivering rapid recovery and adaptation. As a result, systemic operability is drastically reduced, leading to low levels of resilience. Thus, there is a need for rapid assessment of its condition to allow for informed decision-making for restoration prioritisation. A solution to this challenge is to use technology that enables stand-off observations. Nevertheless, no methods exist for automated characterisation of damage at multiple scales, i.e. regional (e.g., network), asset (e.g., bridges), and structural (e.g., road pavement) scales. We propose a methodology based on an integrated, multi-scale tiered approach to fill this capability gap. In doing so, we demonstrate how automated damage characterisation can be enabled by fit-for-purpose digital technologies. Next, the methodology is applied and validated to a case study in Ukraine that includes 17 bridges, damaged by human targeted interventions. From regional to component scale, we deploy technology to integrate assessments using Sentinel-1 SAR images, crowdsourced information, and high-resolution images for deep learning to facilitate automatic damage detection and characterisation. For the first time, the interferometric coherence difference and semantic segmentation of images were deployed in a tiered multi-scale approach to improve the reliability of damage characterisations at different scales.

Nikolas Papadopoulos, Nikolaos Ioannis Bountos, Maria Sdraka et al.

Ground deformation is regarded in volcanology as a key precursor signal preceding volcanic eruptions. Satellite-based Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) enables consistent, global-scale deformation tracking; however, deep learning methods remain largely unexplored in this domain, mainly due to the lack of a curated machine learning dataset. In this work, we build on the existing Hephaestus dataset, and introduce Hephaestus Minicubes, a global collection of 38 spatiotemporal datacubes offering high resolution, multi-source and multi-temporal information, covering 44 of the world's most active volcanoes over a 7-year period. Each spatiotemporal datacube integrates InSAR products, topographic data, as well as atmospheric variables which are known to introduce signal delays that can mimic ground deformation in InSAR imagery. Furthermore, we provide expert annotations detailing the type, intensity and spatial extent of deformation events, along with rich text descriptions of the observed scenes. Finally, we present a comprehensive benchmark, demonstrating Hephaestus Minicubes' ability to support volcanic unrest monitoring as a multi-modal, multi-temporal classification and semantic segmentation task, establishing strong baselines with state-of-the-art architectures. This work aims to advance machine learning research in volcanic monitoring, contributing to the growing integration of data-driven methods within Earth science applications.