Flood Detection On Low Cost Orbital Hardware

Understand

Satellite imaging is a critical technology for monitoring and responding to natural disasters such as flooding.

• Despite the capabilities of modern satellites, there is still much to be desired from the perspective of first response organisations like UNICEF.
• Two main challenges are rapid access to data, and the ability to automatically identify flooded regions in images.
• We describe a prototypical flood segmentation system, identifying cloud, water and land, that could be deployed on a constellation of small satellites, performing processing on board to reduce downlink bandwidth by 2 orders of magnitude.