RiverScope: High-Resolution River Masking Dataset
This provides a valuable resource for fine-scale hydrological modeling to support climate adaptation and sustainable water management, though it is incremental as it builds on existing satellite data with new annotations.
The authors tackled the challenge of monitoring narrow or sediment-rich rivers at fine spatial scales by introducing RiverScope, a high-resolution dataset of 1,145 expert-labeled images covering 2,577 square kilometers, which enabled a global benchmark for river width estimation with a median error of 7.2 meters.
Surface water dynamics play a critical role in Earth's climate system, influencing ecosystems, agriculture, disaster resilience, and sustainable development. Yet monitoring rivers and surface water at fine spatial and temporal scales remains challenging -- especially for narrow or sediment-rich rivers that are poorly captured by low-resolution satellite data. To address this, we introduce RiverScope, a high-resolution dataset developed through collaboration between computer science and hydrology experts. RiverScope comprises 1,145 high-resolution images (covering 2,577 square kilometers) with expert-labeled river and surface water masks, requiring over 100 hours of manual annotation. Each image is co-registered with Sentinel-2, SWOT, and the SWOT River Database (SWORD), enabling the evaluation of cost-accuracy trade-offs across sensors -- a key consideration for operational water monitoring. We also establish the first global, high-resolution benchmark for river width estimation, achieving a median error of 7.2 meters -- significantly outperforming existing satellite-derived methods. We extensively evaluate deep networks across multiple architectures (e.g., CNNs and transformers), pretraining strategies (e.g., supervised and self-supervised), and training datasets (e.g., ImageNet and satellite imagery). Our best-performing models combine the benefits of transfer learning with the use of all the multispectral PlanetScope channels via learned adaptors. RiverScope provides a valuable resource for fine-scale and multi-sensor hydrological modeling, supporting climate adaptation and sustainable water management.