Fusing SAR Images and Social Media Data Through Domain Adaptation and Land Cover Information: A Case of 2017 Houston Flood Event

Global climate change leads to increasing frequency and severity of urban flood disasters, which restricts human sustainable development. So far, many studies have explored the potential of fusing remote sensing images and social media data for monitoring urban flood disasters. However, the SAR flooded characteristics of different land cover in complex urban environment are generally ignored. In this paper, we develop a new method for the fusion of heterogeneous SAR images and social media data by using domain adaptation and land cover information. The 2017 Houston flood event is taken as a case study for evaluation. According to our experiments, compared with traditional methods of optimal transport and geographic optimal transport, the proposed method can align the geo-tagged tweets with location uncertainty to nearby flooded areas of low-, medium-, and high-intensity developed areas with more remarkable performance.