An automatic water detection approach based on Dempster-Shafer theory for multi-spectral images

Detection of surface water in natural environment via multi-spectral imagery has been widely utilized in many fields, such land cover identification. However, due to the similarity of the spectra of water bodies, built-up areas, approaches based on high-resolution satellites sometimes confuse these features. A popular direction to detect water is spectral index, often requiring the ground truth to find appropriate thresholds manually. As for traditional machine learning methods, they identify water merely via differences of spectra of various land covers, without taking specific properties of spectral reflection into account. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach to detect water bodies based on Dempster-Shafer theory, combining supervised learning with specific property of water in spectral band in a fully unsupervised context. The benefits of our approach are twofold. On the one hand, it performs well in mapping principle water bodies, including little streams and branches. On the other hand, it labels all objects usually confused with water as ‘ignorance’, including half-dry watery areas, built-up areas and semi-transparent clouds and shadows. ‘Ignorance’ indicates not only limitations of the spectral properties of water and supervised learning itself but insufficiency of information from multi-spectral bands as well, providing valuable information for further land cover classification.