Kuro Siwo: 33 billion $m^2$ under the water. A global multi-temporal satellite dataset for rapid flood mapping
This addresses the problem of precise flood mapping for disaster response and climate adaptation, providing a foundational resource for researchers and practitioners, though it is incremental as it builds on existing SAR and dataset creation methods.
The authors tackled the lack of large annotated datasets for flood segmentation using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) remote sensing by introducing Kuro Siwo, a manually annotated multi-temporal dataset spanning 43 global flood events, which maps over 338 billion m² of land with 33 billion m² designated as flooded or permanent water bodies.
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.