U-Prithvi: Integrating a Foundation Model and U-Net for Enhanced Flood Inundation Mapping

🤖 Plain-English Summary

In recent years, large pre-trained models, commonly referred to as foundation models, have become increasingly popular for various tasks leveraging transfer learning. Our approach is evaluated on the Sen1Floods11 dataset for flood inundation mapping, and experimental results demonstrate better performance of U-Prithvi over both individual models, achieving improved performance on out-of-sample data.

🔑 Key Findings

• This trend has expanded to remote sensing, where transformer-based foundation models such as Prithvi, msGFM, and SatSwinMAE have been utilized for a range of applications.
• While these transformer-based models, particularly the Prithvi model, exhibit strong generalization capabilities, they have limitations on capturing fine-grained details compared to convolutional neural network architectures like U-Net in segmentation tasks.
• In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, U-Prithvi, which combines the strengths of the Prithvi transformer with those of U-Net.

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