Small Landslide Susceptibility and Hazard Assessment Based on Airborne Lidar Data

• Published in: Photogrammetric engineering and remote sensing 2015-03, Vol.81 (3), p.239-247
• Main Authors: Mora, Omar E., Liu, Jung-kuan, Gabriela Lenzano, M., Toth, Charles K., Grejner-Brzezinska, Dorota A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Geomorphology; Hazards; Landslides; Lidar; Mapping; Support vector machines
• ISSN: 0099-1112; 2374-8079
• DOI: 10.14358/PERS.81.3.239

Landslides are natural disasters that cause environmental and infrastructure damage worldwide. To prevent future risk posed by such events, effective methods to detect and map their hazards are needed. Traditional landslide susceptibility mapping techniques, based on field inspection, aerial photograph interpretation, and contour map analysis are often subjective, tedious, difficult to implement, and may not have the spatial resolution and temporal frequency necessary to map small slides, which is the focus of this investigation.We present a methodology that is based on a Support Vector Machine (SVM) that utilizes a lidar-derived Digital Elevation Model (DEM) to quantify and map the topographic signatures of landslides. The algorithm employs several geomorphological features to calibrate the model and delineate between landslide and stable terrain. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, a road corridor in Zanesville, Ohio, was used for testing. The resulting landslide susceptibility map was validated to correctly identify 67 of the 80 mapped landslides in the independently compiled landslide inventory map of the area. These results suggest that the proposed landslide surface feature extraction method and airborne lidar data can be used as efficient tools for small landslide susceptibility and hazard mapping.