Extraction Of Small Dam Reservoirs Using A Combination Of Digital Terrain Model And Water Mask Derived From Satellite Images

• Main Authors: Oosterhof, Come, Gasnier, Nicolas, Luque, Santiago Pena, Tanguy, Yannick
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Dams; Data mining; Ecosystems; Geoscience and remote sensing; Reservoirs; Satellite images
• ISSN: 2153-7003
• DOI: 10.1109/IGARSS52108.2023.10281847

Dam reservoirs account for only a small fraction of the global freshwater but they have major importance for human activities, providing water for agriculture, domestic, recreational, and industrial use, especially in a context of water scarcity induced by climate change [1] . They also have major impacts on the hydro- and ecosystems [2] . While they are subject to numerous studies across multiple disciplinary fields [3] , [4] , no exhaustive database of existing dam reservoirs is available, and the available data are limited to the largest reservoirs. Thus, there is a need for a method to automatically extract dam reservoirs from widely available data such as satellite images. This task is different from the broader water surface extraction task [5] , [6] as the goal is also to distinguish dam reservoirs from other waterbodies. Some approaches have been proposed to achieve it, for example by Van Soesbergen et al. [7] . However, this extraction task using only single images can be very difficult for very small waterbodies (below 1 hectare).