Estimation of Water Depth from Multispectral Drone Imagery : A suitability assessment of CNN models for bathymetry retrieval in shallow water areas

Sammanfattning: Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus are the main vector species for dengue disease and zika, two arboviruses that affect a substantial fraction of the global population. These mosquitoes breed in very slow-moving or standing pools of water, so detecting and managing these potential breeding habitats is a crucial step in preventing the spread of these diseases. Using high-resolution images collected by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and their multispectral mapping data, this paper investigated bathymetry retrieval model in shallow water areas to help improve the habitat detection accuracy. While previous studies have found some success with shallow water bathymetry inversion on satellite imagery, accurate centimeter-level water depth regression from high-resolution, drone multispectral imagery still remains a challenge. Unlike previous retrieval methods generally relying on retrieval factor extraction and linear regression, this thesis introduced CNN methods, considering the nonlinear relationship between image pixel reflectance values and water depth. In order to look into CNN’s potential to retrieve shallow water depths from multispectral images captured by a drone, this thesis conducts a variety of case studies to respectively specify a proper CNN architecture, compare its performance in different datasets, band combinations, depth ranges and with other general bathymetry retrieval algorithms. In summary, the CNN-based model achieves the best regression accuracy of overall root mean square error lower than 0.5, in comparison with another machine learning algorithm, random forest, and 2 other semi-empirical methods, linear and ratio model, suggesting this thesis’s practical significance.