Beyond Backscatter: AlphaEarth Land-Cover Priors for Rapid SAR Flood Segmentation Across Foundation Backbones
Rapid flood mapping is critical for emergency response, yet optical imagery is often unusable during major flooding and single-temporal SAR is ambiguous, since new inundation, permanent water, and other smooth surfaces produce similar backscatter. This study evaluates whether stable land-context priors can improve post-event SAR flood segmentation when a registered, seasonally matched pre-event acquisition is unavailable. Using the CONUS (Continental United States) subset of ImpactMesh-Flood, we compare four backbones spanning distinct pretraining regimes-a from-scratch CNN UNet, an ImageNet-pretrained UNet, the SAR-pretrained TerraMind Vision Transformer, and the optical-satellite-pretra...
| Authors | Sanjay Thasma, Yu-Hsuan Ho, Ali Mostafavi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 28 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 June 2026 |
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