A light-weight model to generate NDWI from Sentinel-1
This provides a solution for water body detection applications affected by cloud cover, though it appears incremental as it adapts existing methods to a new data source.
The paper tackled the problem of cloud cover hindering NDWI computation from Sentinel-2 images by developing a deep learning model that generates NDWI from Sentinel-1 images, achieving an accuracy of 0.9134 and an AUC of 0.8656.
The use of Sentinel-2 images to compute Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) has many applications, including water body area detection. However, cloud cover poses significant challenges in this regard, which hampers the effectiveness of Sentinel-2 images in this context. In this paper, we present a deep learning model that can generate NDWI given Sentinel-1 images, thereby overcoming this cloud barrier. We show the effectiveness of our model, where it demonstrates a high accuracy of 0.9134 and an AUC of 0.8656 to predict the NDWI. Additionally, we observe promising results with an R2 score of 0.4984 (for regressing the NDWI values) and a Mean IoU of 0.4139 (for the underlying segmentation task). In conclusion, our model offers a first and robust solution for generating NDWI images directly from Sentinel-1 images and subsequent use for various applications even under challenging conditions such as cloud cover and nighttime.