Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chen, Haonan, Tong, Xin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10084
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916860504571904
author Chen, Haonan
Tong, Xin
author_facet Chen, Haonan
Tong, Xin
contents The Tibetan Plateau, known as the Asian Water Tower, faces significant water security challenges due to its high sensitivity to climate change. Advancing Earth observation for sustainable water monitoring is thus essential for building climate resilience in this region. This study proposes a two-stage transfer learning strategy using the SegFormer model to overcome domain shift and data scarcit--key barriers in developing robust AI for climate-sensitive applications. After pre-training on a diverse source domain, our model was fine-tuned for the arid Zhada Tulin area. Experimental results show a substantial performance boost: the Intersection over Union (IoU) for water body segmentation surged from 25.50% (direct transfer) to 64.84%. This AI-driven accuracy is crucial for disaster risk reduction, particularly in monitoring flash flood-prone systems. More importantly, the high-precision map reveals a highly concentrated spatial distribution of water, with over 80% of the water area confined to less than 20% of the river channel length. This quantitative finding provides crucial evidence for understanding hydrological processes and designing targeted water management and climate adaptation strategies. Our work thus demonstrates an effective technical solution for monitoring arid plateau regions and contributes to advancing AI-powered Earth observation for disaster preparedness in critical transboundary river headwaters.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_10084
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Transfer Learning-Based Method for Water Body Segmentation in Remote Sensing Imagery: A Case Study of the Zhada Tulin Area
Chen, Haonan
Tong, Xin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
The Tibetan Plateau, known as the Asian Water Tower, faces significant water security challenges due to its high sensitivity to climate change. Advancing Earth observation for sustainable water monitoring is thus essential for building climate resilience in this region. This study proposes a two-stage transfer learning strategy using the SegFormer model to overcome domain shift and data scarcit--key barriers in developing robust AI for climate-sensitive applications. After pre-training on a diverse source domain, our model was fine-tuned for the arid Zhada Tulin area. Experimental results show a substantial performance boost: the Intersection over Union (IoU) for water body segmentation surged from 25.50% (direct transfer) to 64.84%. This AI-driven accuracy is crucial for disaster risk reduction, particularly in monitoring flash flood-prone systems. More importantly, the high-precision map reveals a highly concentrated spatial distribution of water, with over 80% of the water area confined to less than 20% of the river channel length. This quantitative finding provides crucial evidence for understanding hydrological processes and designing targeted water management and climate adaptation strategies. Our work thus demonstrates an effective technical solution for monitoring arid plateau regions and contributes to advancing AI-powered Earth observation for disaster preparedness in critical transboundary river headwaters.
title A Transfer Learning-Based Method for Water Body Segmentation in Remote Sensing Imagery: A Case Study of the Zhada Tulin Area
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10084