Earth-Science Reviews 223 (2021) 103858

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Earth-Science Reviews
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/earscirev

Review Article

Deep learning for geological hazards analysis: Data, models, applications,

and opportunities
Zhengjing Ma, Gang Mei *
School of Engineering and Technology, China University of Geosciences (Beijing), 100083 Beijing, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: As natural disasters are induced by geodynamic activities or abnormal changes in the environment, geological
Geological hazards hazards tend to wreak havoc on the environment and human society. Recently, the dramatic increase in the
Earth observation data volume of various types of Earth observation ‘big data’ from multiple sources, and the rapid development of deep
Deep learning
learning as a state-of-the-art data analysis tool, have enabled novel advances in geological hazard analysis, with
Landslide detection
the ultimate aim to mitigate the devastation associated with these hazards. Motivated by numerous applications,
Seismic phase picking
this paper presents an overview of the advances in the utilization of deep learning for geological hazard analysis.
First, six commonly available Earth observation data sources are described, e.g., unmanned aerial vehicles,
satellite platforms, and in-situ monitoring systems. Second, the deep learning background and six typical deep
learning models are introduced, such as convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks. Third,
focusing on six typical geological hazards, i.e., landslides, debris flows, rockfalls, avalanches, earthquakes, and
volcanoes, the deep learning applications for geological hazard analysis are reviewed, and common application
paradigms are summarized. Finally, the challenges and opportunities for the application of deep learning models
for geological hazard analysis are highlighted, with the aim to inspire further related research.

1. Introduction imagery) and real-time in-situ monitoring information. As typical big

Geological hazards (Geohazards) refer to natural disasters that are
caused by geodynamic activity or abnormal changes in the geological
environment, which typically include internal earth processes (e.g.,
earthquakes, volcanic activity, and emissions) and related geophysical
processes (e.g., landslides, debris flows, rockfalls, and avalanches)
(United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2009). Geological
hazards often have severe consequences, cause disorder in society and
the economy, damage the environment, and have enormous costs in
terms of life and property (Brabb, 1991; Nadim et al., 2006; Badoux
et al., 2016; Grahn and Jaldell, 2017; Froude and Petley, 2018). To
mitigate these severe devastations, the analysis of geological hazards
using data that are collected from various sources is necessary.
Recent advances in multiplatform remote sensing from space and
airborne- to ground-based sensors have increased higher than ever the
potential for comprehensive understanding and precise predictions of
geological hazards (Agapiou, 2017; Casagli et al., 2017). Abundant data
become available for geological hazard analysis, which includes diverse
imagery (e.g., optical imagery, multispectral imagery, and radar
data, geological hazard-related data have four ‘V’ characteristics: vol­
ume (the enormity of the data), velocity (rapid change of the data),
variety (diverse data sources), and veracity (the uncertainty of the data)
(Reichstein et al., 2019). However, it is difficult to sensibly introduce big
data into conventional methods. First, traditional methods are typically
time-consuming. For example, in seismic phase picking, manually
checking and identifying the waveform is labor-intensive. In landslide
detection, conventional machine learning methods require cumbersome
feature selection. Second, traditional methods investigate and predict
geological hazards by using linear and lower-order properties; conse­
quently, these traditional methods have difficulty extracting available
information from big data and fail to represent complex geodynamic and
physical processes. For example, pixel-based methods employed for
landslide detection tend to ignore the geometric and contextual infor­
mation in remote sensing imagery.
Over the past few years, deep learning has come to the fore in ap­
plications for geological hazard analysis. Deep learning is a subdisci­
pline of machine learning that consists of successive operations that
progressively extract complex features by utilizing the results of

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: gang.mei@cugb.edu.cn (G. Mei).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2021.103858
Received 25 March 2021; Received in revised form 30 October 2021; Accepted 2 November 2021
Available online 8 November 2021
0012-8252/© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Z. Ma and G. Mei
previous operations as input (Eraslan et al., 2019; Goodfellow et al.,
2016; Chen et al., 2019). Compared with physics-based models, which
are based on physical processes associated with geohazards and are
restricted by strict application conditions, deep learning models have
the inherent and distinct advantages based on data-driven paradigms,
and as a result, can be more flexible in automatically obtaining
high-level information from big data (Ma et al., 2021a; LeCun et al.,
2015; Reichstein et al., 2019; Bergen et al., 2019; Yuan et al., 2020).
Studies have gradually demonstrated the potential of deep learning
to analyze geological hazard data effectively. It has been introduced into
multiple tasks for various types of geological hazards, e.g., landslide and
debris flow detection, landslide susceptibility assessment, seismic data
interpolation, and denoising, along with earthquake detection and
localization.
In this paper, we discuss various applications of deep learning in the
analysis of several representative geological hazards. To the best of the
authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first comprehensive survey of
recent advances in deep learning-based geological hazard analysis. The
main contributions of this survey can be summarized as follows:
(1) We investigate several major heterogeneous data sources. In the
application of deep learning models to geological hazard analysis,
these sources provide an enormous amount of data support.
(2) We present the background of deep learning models and discuss
the current state-of-the-art deep learning techniques by consid­
ering several common models. Furthermore, we emphasize their
potentials for applications in various geological hazard analyses,
which contributes to the selection of a suitable deep learning
model in specified application scenarios.
(3) We review the real-world applications of deep learning models in
geological hazard analysis according to various hazard types.
These applications demonstrate the strength of various deep
learning models in diverse geological hazard analyses.
(4) We discuss the challenges and potential solutions of deep learning
models that are applied in geological hazard analysis, and high­
light novel opportunities and promising future directions.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces six
major heterogeneous data sources. Section 3 reviews the deep learning
background and presents the eight most influential deep learning
models developed in detail. Section 4 investigates the applications of
deep learning models in six typical geological hazards. Section 5 dis­
cusses the challenges and future directions. Section 6 concludes this
survey.
2. Deep learning for geological hazard analysis: data source
Currently, the data that are employed for deep learning applications
in geological hazard analysis originate from many heterogeneous sour­
ces. In this section, six major categories are introduced: field surveys,
unmanned aerial vehicles, aerial platforms, satellite platforms, in-situ
monitoring systems, and seismic reflection.
2.1. Field surveys
After the occurrence of catastrophic damage, for the purpose of
collecting more information as available on the hazard as possible (e.g.,
visual characteristics of certain geological hazards), the field survey is
commonly employed. It refers to field observations that are conducted
by humans (Guzzetti et al., 2012). The field survey is typically applied to
investigate landslides or debris flows, thus assessing these geological
hazards’ potential impact at the local level, and demonstrating unique
information about the evolution of disasters.
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2.2. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been rapidly
developed, and they are characterized by high performance, low cost,
operational flexibility, and high spatial resolution. These advantages
enable these devices to be powerful tools for real-time ground-based
rapid survey and detailed scale analysis of large damaged areas (Colo­
mina and Molina, 2014; Travelletti et al., 2012; James and Robson,
2012; Remondino et al., 2011). By combining multiple camera sensors
(e.g., thermal sensor cameras, multispectral cameras, and hyperspectral
cameras), UAVs can rapidly produce many images in geological hazard
investigations (Giordan et al., 2018; Rossi et al., 2018; Chae et al.,
2017).
2.3. Aerial photography
In many cases, the interpretation of aerial photographs remains the
most common method for identifying and mapping geological hazards
(Guzzetti et al., 2012). The primary reasons are the simplicity of the
techniques and tools that are required for interpreting aerial photo­
graphs (e.g., stereoscopes) and the low cost. Aerial photographs are
typically 21 cm × 21 cm, and their scale is typically between 1:5000 and
1:70000. Hence, reasonably many photographs are available to cover
the large area where a hazard occurred (Keefer, 2002; Malamud et al.,
2004).
Aerial photographs capture a range of characteristics that are useful
for image recognition and classification, which include the surface shape
of the topography, along with the color, tone, patchiness, and texture.
Moreover, computer-aided stereo vision techniques facilitate the gen­
eration of stereo aerial photographs, where a suitable combination of
photographs that are identified by overlapping sides and laterals is
instrumental for best identifying and mapping geohazards, especially
slope-related geohazards (Nichol et al., 2006). A common example is the
capture of the landslide distribution from such photographs as a basis to
further map landslide inventories (Harp et al., 2011).
2.4. Satellite platforms
In the past few decades, increasingly many satellites have been
launched into the low Earth orbit. These synthetic aperture radar sys­
tems, passive optical imaging systems, and global navigation satellite
systems (GNSSs) provide a large amount of Earth observation data and,
thus, enhance the monitoring capability for geological hazards (Elliott,
2020). Currently, the satellites that typically provide data that are
related to the identification, detection, and mapping of geological haz­
ards include Sentinel, RapidEye, ALOS, Landsat, GeoEye, and QuickBird.
Additional details are presented in Table 1 and Table 2 (see the tables in
the appendix).
The acquired satellite data of the study areas of potential geological
hazards can be categorized into four groups according to the following
applications: (i) multispectral optical images for optical information
analysis of geohazard areas (Martha et al., 2010; Kumar et al., 2021), (ii)
high-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) for surface morphology
analysis (Lan et al., 2010; Schulz, 2007; Prokop and Panholzer, 2009;
Derron and Jaboyedoff, 2010), (iii) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) im­
ages and interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) images for
detection of situations in hazardous areas without limitation of time and
weather (Martha et al., 2010; Parker et al., 2011; Mondini et al., 2011),
and (iv) global positioning system (GPS) data for measuring surface
deformations in the affected area (Hu et al., 2018; Schaefer et al., 2019;
Guzzetti et al., 2009; Hooper et al., 2007; Cascini et al., 2010).
First, multispectral images obtained by high-resolution, or very-
high-resolution optical satellite sensors, are preferred for the analysis
and classification of geological hazards (Guzzetti et al., 2012). One of
the reasons is that changes in land cover that are triggered by geological
hazards can induce variations in the spectral signature at the ground
Z. Ma and G. Mei
surface. For example, the bands in the cloud-free multispectral images
from the RapidEye, including blue (440 ~ 510 nm), green (520 ~
590 nm), red (630 ~ 685 nm), and near-infrared (760 ~ 850 nm) can
provide optical information for the application of deep learning models
in landslide detection (Ghorbanzadeh et al., 2019a).
Furthermore, in vegetated mountainous areas, the spectral indices
(e.g., normalized vegetation and soil indices) from multispectral images
are available to enhance the recognition performed by deep learning
models in vegetation areas versus soil areas (Shi et al., 2020). Typically,
the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) can be calculated by
bands of optical images (Piralilou et al., 2019).
Second, DEM data, especially high-resolution DEM data, are
commonly utilized to extract topographic information (Pike, 1988).
From the perspective of deep learning, DEM data can provide abundant
surrounding spatial information in tasks related to geological hazards
such as landslides. The occurrence of these hazards is frequently tightly
related to the surroundings. Consequently, DEM data are effectively
employed in deep learning models for either landslide identification or
landslide sensitivity assessments (Jaboyedoff et al., 2012). Typically,
DEM data can be obtained from radar or optical stereophotogrammetry,
including SPOT, Pleiades, Worldview, airborne laser profilers, and light
detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors (Ardizzone et al., 2007; Van Den
Eeckhaut et al., 2007).
Third, in adverse meteorological situations, the application of SAR
images to train deep learning models is an alternative for the detection
of geohazards (Elliott, 2020; Dai et al., 2020; Biggs and Wright, 2020).
SAR images derived from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 have served as the
major training dataset for most deep learning models applied to
avalanche detection, where training images are generated according to
various SAR features. These features tend to be derived from the dif­
ference between the reference images and the active images, involving
horizontal and polarization (Bianchi et al., 2021). Furthermore, SAR
data are also available for the detection of landslides and debris flows.
An example is the application of pre-disaster SAR images, post-disaster
SAR images to train deep learning models that aim to analyze sedi­
ment hazard areas after heavy rainfalls (An et al., 2020). These SAR
images can also be applied in landslide susceptibility assessments as an
input data source, thus providing landslide inventory data (Ghorban­
zadeh et al., 2020).
On the other hand, interferometric SAR (InSAR) images, which are
also known as interferograms, are derived from the phase difference
between differential interferometric SAR images (Milillo et al., 2014;
Kuraoka et al., 2018; Carlà et al., 2016). Commonly, InSAR data
contribute to the insight of deep learning models into the deformation
process of the ground surface (Chaussard et al., 2013, 2015, 2017; Elliott
et al., 2016; Dumont et al., 2018; Garthwaite et al., 2019). A typical
application is to recognize volcanic deformation in InSAR data by using
deep learning models.
Finally, GPS is extensively applied for surface deformation moni­
toring due to its capability to locate topographical surface characteris­
tics reliably and simply (Rawat et al., 2011). GNSS measures ground
motion at a very high frequency and spatial accuracy in real-time (Li
et al., 2015; Mufundirwa et al., 2010); the monitoring data provided by
GPS and GNSS enable deep learning models to be trained for predicting
the future state of surface deformations in monitored areas; a typical
application scenario is landslide displacement prediction (Ma et al.,
2021b).
2.5. In-situ monitoring systems
To continuously collect various monitoring data, monitoring systems
are typically deployed in key locations throughout hazard-prone areas.
A monitoring system consists of multiple in-situ sensors.
In consideration of the limitations of remote sensing technology, for
fast-moving hazards (e.g., landslides or debris flows), real-time or near-
real-time monitoring systems provide a complement with more detailed
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information. Common monitoring targets include surface movement
(Dai et al., 2020), groundwater (Comiti et al., 2014; Berti and Simoni,
2010), and rainfall (Nikolopoulos et al., 2014; Underwood et al., 2016;
Guzzetti et al., 2007); the corresponding monitoring devices include
inclinometers, extensometers, soil moisture probes, pore water pressure
sensors, and rain gauges.
Seismic networks are designed to record ground motions that are
generated by seismic waves that propagate from natural and anthro­
pogenic sources. Depending on the scope of the investigation, seismic
networks are categorized as global, regional, and local systems (Cremen
and Galasso, 2020; Allen and Melgar, 2019). A global network consists
of a set of ‘primary’ stations that cover most countries. Regional net­
works are typically located in the expected epicenter area or high seis­
micity area of a region. The limited number of stations in the local
network are mainly located near target sites/infrastructure, as in the
case of temporary deployments for capturing aftershock sequences of
large earthquakes or networks for monitoring volcanic activity.
Typically, a seismic station is equipped with a receiver (e.g., seis­
mometer) and a recorder (e.g., datalogger). Three-component broad­
band seismometers can monitor ground movement in 3 directions (e.g.,
vertically and horizontally east-west and north-south) and cover a wide
band of frequencies. The seismic data that are collected with three
channels are continually converted into seismograms and stored.
Furthermore, digital seismic networks that contain digital real-time
acquisition systems are in operation. The objective is to continuously
monitor the seismicity and rapidly identify locations of earthquakes
within minutes.
2.6. Seismic reflection
A seismic survey involves imaging of a subsurface by reflections and
refractions of (artificial) seismic signals. The returned waves that are
generated by suitable sources at suitable locations are measured using
receivers (e.g., terrestrial seismometers or underwater hydrophones) at
other locations and stored using recorders. Currently, seismic surveys
are conducted in environments that range from land to ocean. The most
commonly used survey method is multichannel acquisition, where a
multicomponent receiver records motion components in multiple di­
rections and produces highly detailed images (seismograms) from
shallow (tens of meters) to deep (several kilometers or even tens of ki­
lometers) intervals.
In each experiment (shot), the reflected energy that is generated by
the shot is detected and recorded by detectors as a seismic trace. A
seismogram is an ordered collection of seismic traces, which is termed a
gather. A single-channel seismogram is recorded by a single detector or a
set of detectors. A multichannel seismogram is recorded using multiple
detectors or groups of detectors at various locations. Additionally,
reflection seismic data can be graphically presented as a 2D or 3D grid of
pixels, where each pixel contains the value of the model parameter (e.g.,
P-wave velocity, S-wave velocity, porosity, density, or anisotropic
parameters).
3. Deep learning for geological hazard analysis: models
In this section, we will present an overview of deep learning, and we
will introduce in detail six typical deep learning models that are
increasingly being applied to geological hazards analysis. These models
include (1) convolutional neural networks (CNNs) (Nikolopoulos et al.,
2014); (2) recurrent neural networks (RNNs) (Berti and Simoni, 2010);
(3) deep generative models (Turhan and Bilge, 2018), such as deep
belief networks (DBNs) (Hinton et al., 2006a), autoencoders (AEs), and
generative adversarial networks (GANs) (Goodfellow et al., 2014); and
(4) graph neural networks (GNNs) (Scarselli et al., 2009).
Z. Ma and G. Mei
3.1. Brief introduction to deep learning
Deep learning originates from artificial neural networks (ANNs) (Ma
et al., 2021a). Typically, an ANN consists of a collection of connected
neural neurons, as illustrated in Fig. 1(a).
The propagation process of neural networks achieves through the
operation of some non-linear activation function and parameters {W, b},
where W is a weight vector, and b is a bias. At each layer, using an
operation W x + b, neurons obtain a weighted sum as input from the
output of the preceding layer, and then passes the output through an
activation function σ(⋅), e.g., Sigmoid, Tanh, and Rectified Linear Unit
(ReLU) (see Fig. 1(b)).
The series of layers between the input and output is termed the
hidden layer (Litjens et al., 2017). Multiple hidden layers can be stacked
to create a ‘deep’ neural network. For a fully connected deep neural
network, every neuron in a layer l − 1 is connected with all the other
neurons in the subsequent layer l. The process of data propagation is
expressed in Eq. (1). Multiple fully connected neural networks form a
multilayer perceptron (MLP), which is the simplest and most basic
deep learning model.
( )
x(l) = σ W(l) ⋅x(l− 1) + b(l) (1)
The training process of the deep learning model follows an empirical
risk minimization paradigm, where the parameters of the model are
optimized by utilizing forward and backward propagation.
More specifically, in the forward propagation process, the discrep­
ancy between the outputs y′ and ground truth y of the last layer is
calculated as the error to be minimized, according to the defined loss
function. The loss function varies according to the deep learning task (i.
e., classification and regression). Typically, mean square error and
mean absolute error functions are suitable for regression tasks, while
cross-entropy and KLD loss functions are suitable for most classifica­
tion tasks (Tsoumakas and Katakis, 2007). In the backpropagation
process, a suitable optimization algorithm is employed to minimize the
loss. Common optimization algorithms include gradient descent and its
variants (e.g., RMSprop and Adam function).
According to training objectives and paradigms, deep learning
models are typically divided into two major categories: supervised and
unsupervised learning. As illustrated in Fig. 2, supervised learning
aims at training a model that accepts features as input, and outputs a
prediction for a target variable. Unsupervised learning aims at
describing unlabeled input data by learning the valuable properties of
the training set.
Furthermore, novel transfer learning has emerged as an improve­
ment on the deep learning training paradigm, which extends the
application of a deep learning model beyond a specific task and
Fig. 1. The forward propagation of a neural network: (a) the operating process of neural networks and (b) a fully connected architecture of neural networks.
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Earth-Science Reviews 223 (2021) 103858
environment (Panigrahi et al., 2021). The advantage of transfer learning
is that it can overcome the dependence on large amounts of data or
labeled datasets, by leveraging knowledge from pre-trained models from
one environment to solve new problems in a new environment (Good­
fellow et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2019a; Wang et al., 2021a). Once
performing a new task, it is only necessary to fine-tune the later layers of
the original model.
Due to the superior performance of transfer learning, it is extraor­
dinarily suitable for handling limited datasets, which is a problem that is
shared by most geohazard-specific tasks (Marmanis et al., 2016).
Transfer learning has been applied to several geohazard research sce­
narios in which the data that is collected in the study area are scarce or
inadequate. For example, transfer learning has been employed in the
detection of avalanches and volcanic activity, which contributes to the
accurate performance of deep learning models in situations where SAR
data is scarce (Bueno et al., 2020; Sinha et al., 2019a; Titos et al., 2020).
3.2. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs)
The tremendous flexibility of CNNs, have rendered them among the
most successful and prevalent deep learning models (Krizhevsky et al.,
2012; Gu et al., 2018). Although initially designed for computer vision
tasks, CNNs have been extended to various domains, including signal
processing and natural language processing, and exhibit impressive
performance when performing on diverse types of data (Krizhevsky
et al., 2012; He et al., 2016a; Girshick, 2015; Ren et al., 2017).
Typically, a basic CNN model consists of three layers, convolutional,
pooling, and fully connected layers, where a convolutional layer is
responsible for extracting features, and thus enables a CNN model to
integrate features more effectively with spatial contextual information
from the input data (see Fig. 3). A convolution layer commonly involves
two main operations: convolution and activation. The details are as
follows:
For example, in a convolution operation, a filter
( )
Fk ∈ ℝw×w×d3 1 ≤ k ≤ K(l) , which is also termed a kernel, is applied
into given input data x ∈ ℝd1 ×d2 ×d3 for extracting local features, where w
is the fixed size of the filter Fk and K(l) is the number of sets of kernels.
As illustrated in Fig. 4, convolution is a simple linear operation,
where each filter is applied to overlap over a certain location (i, j) of the
input data x, and calculate a dot product between the elements in the
local region (i.e., the receptive field) [x]i j ∈ ℝw×w×d3 and the filter Fk,
and thus outputting a feature map Oi jk∈ ℝ(d1 − w+1)×(d2 − w+1)×K (see Eq.
(l)
(2)). A set of filters swiped across the input data according to a certain
stride and repeat the above process in each swipe position, where a
stride indicates the step size to move a filter (Ma et al., 2019). The gap
i′ − i and j′ − j between two receptive fields xi j and xi′ j′ is controlled by a
Z. Ma and G. Mei Earth-Science Reviews 223 (2021) 103858

Fig. 2. The supervised learning process for a deep learning model. (a) The data are partitioned into three parts. (b) The training process is monitored by periodically
evaluating losses on the validation set. To maximize the usage of the GPU memory, only a small subset of the training set is utilized in each optimization step. (c)
Finally, The model is evaluated on the test set.

Fig. 3. Basic architecture of a conventional CNN.

Fig. 4. Visualization of an example for operation on the convolutional layer, where the stride refers to the amount of movement between applied filters on the input
matrix. (a) 2D point of view. (b) 3D point of view.

stride. This set of filters results in a feature map Ok ∈ ℝ(d1 − w+1)×(d2 − w+1) ,
〈 〉 ∑w ∑
w ∑
d3
which can detect the same feature in different locations of the input Oki j = [x]i j , Fk = [x]i+i′ − 1,j+j − 1,l [Fk ]i ,j ,l
′ ′ ′ (2)
data. Finally, an activation function performs the nonlinear trans­ ′ ′
i =1 j =1 l=1
formation to extract features ̃ x from the input data x (see Eq. (3)).

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Z. Ma and G. Mei Earth-Science Reviews 223 (2021) 103858

( )
̃xi jk = σ Oi jk , will perform the class prediction of the pixels that correspond to that
∀i ∈ [d1 − w + 1], (3) position, which facilitates the identification of information relating to
∀j ∈ [d2 −[ w + ] 1], hazards including landslides, mudslides, and avalanches from satellite
∀k ∈ K (l) images. In addition, in the analysis of earthquake and volcano activities,
CNN-based models can also be used to identify seismic waveform fea­
To reduce the number of learnable parameters and increase robust­
tures from seismograms.
ness to distortions such as slight shifts and rotations of the input data,
Common CNN-based models for semantic segmentation include fully
pooling layers are also typically employed to downsample the extracted
convolutional networks (FCNs) and their variants (Long et al., 2015).
features from the convolutional layer. Two main types of pooling layers
FCNs substitute fully connected layers in the original CNNs with con­
are max pooling and average pooling.
volutional layers, which thus involve only convolutional (subsampling
Furthermore, a number of novel operations can further enhance the
or upsampling) operations. The advantages of FCNs over the classic
performance of basic CNNs, e.g., attention mechanism (Vaswani et al.,
CNNs are that (1) they avoid the loss of spatial information; (2) they
2017; Luong et al., 2015). Similar to other concepts in deep learning,
significantly reduce the computational parameters involved; and (3)
attention mechanism is also an attempt to mimic human brain actions,
they increase the representational capability. Therefore, FCNs are more
which can selectively concentrate on specified features while ignoring
suitable for segmentation tasks, whose major limitation is that they are
others in deep learning models. The attention mechanism facilitates
prone to ignore the relationships between pixels and thus insensitive to
CNNs to improve representations and overcome computational limita­
the details of an image (Pan et al., 2020). This limitation may compro­
tions, thereby enabling CNN-based models to recognize objects from
mise FCNs from effectively capturing global context information (Min­
cluttered backgrounds and complex scenes.
aee et al., 2021).
Considering the advantages of the attention mechanism in computer
To overcome the limitation, various variants of FCN have emerged,
vision applications, it has been incorporated into a number of deep
for example, SegNet (Badrinarayanan et al., 2017) and U-Net (Ronne­
learning models for landslide detection, thereby enhancing the capa­
berger et al., 2015), which improved on the original FCN by employing
bility of these models in capturing important information in remotely
encoder-decoder architectures (see Fig. 5). In these architectures, the
sensed images. For example, attention mechanisms are employed to
encoder incrementally reduces the spatial dimension, while the decoder
enable CNN-based models to emphatically distinguish the specific fea­
incrementally recovers the detail and spatial dimension of the object.
tures of diverse landslides from complicated environments (Ji et al.,
The decoder receives information from the encoder part of the same
2020).
level of the feature mapping by exploiting the skip connection, thus
Another interesting operation is the skip connection. By adding or
enabling finer localization (Falk et al., 2019).
directly concatenating, skip concatenation allows the output of one layer
As the most common variant of FCNs employed in geological hazard
of a deep neural network to be applied as input to the next layer and to
analysis, U-Net, initially designed for medical images, has been
all other layers, thus avoiding information loss in deep learning models.
demonstrated to be particularly effective in satellite image segmenta­
Skip connections are also known as residual connections (He et al.,
tion. U-Net has been introduced in geological hazard analysis, which can
2016b). A residual block is a stack of layers, where the output of one
realize accurate segmentation for satellite images in detecting regional
layer can be connected to a deeper block of another layer, which
objects (e.g., landslides, avalanches, and volcanoes) (Bianchi et al.,
effectively simplifies the training of deep learning models.
2021). Since U-Net maintains the structural integrity of images, the ar­
Overall, the performance of CNN-based models depends on the
chitecture is also considered for the accurate reconstruction of damaged
different architectures involving various operations. The first successful
seismic data. In addition, other popular CNN-based models commonly
CNN model was the LeNet (LeCun et al., 1998), which is the simplest
applied to semantic segmentation include Mask R-CNN (He et al., 2017)
and most basic CNN model. AlexNet was the first (Krizhevsky et al.,
and DeepLab (Chen et al., 2018).
2012); VGGNet focuses on the effect of the convolutional neural
Furthermore, in semantic segmentation tasks, the attention mecha­
network depth on its accuracy, thus stacking more convolutional layers
nism contributes to a more accurate segmentation by automatically
and reducing parameters by employing smaller convolutional kernels
identifying more relevant information. For example, CNN-based models
(Simonyan and Zisserman, 2015); GoogleNet focuses on obtaining
incorporating global attention, enable further capture of significant
better representations and concatenates the feature maps of filters of
global spatial information from SAR images, e.g., pixel-to-pixel posi­
different sizes. Furthermore, it replaces the fully connected layer with a
tional relationships (An et al., 2020). The operation of skip connections
global average pooling operation to reduce the number of parameters
is also suitable for improving deep learning models that are applied in
(Szegedy et al., 2015); ResNet, which includes a series of residual
semantic segmentation tasks related to geological hazard analysis. For
blocks, can solve the vanishing gradient problem, allowing the training
example, residual blocks were integrated into a deep U-Net model
of an extremely deep network up to a thousand layers (He et al., 2016a);
developed for seismic data reconstruction, facilitating the model to
DenseNet, which is designed to adopt information from previous layers,
efficiently combine features from different levels of data, and improving
concatenates feature maps from different layers (Huang et al., 2017).
training efficiency (Tang et al., 2020).
With their target detection ability, CNNs can be quite advantageous
in various applications for geological hazard identification. For
example, when applied to landslide detection, CNN-based models can 3.3. Recurrent neural networks (RNN)
capture landslide-related optical information from training datasets.
These training datasets are image patches of a certain size obtained by RNNs are another type of commonly utilized deep learning model
sampling in various methods from the original remote sensing images that is designed to handle sequence data in which the current input data
(Sharma et al., 2017). Typically, the optimal patches obtained by a are constantly dependent on the previously implemented input. The
suitable sampling method and size setting are able to capture the objective of RNNs is to capture the dependency between the current time
spatially localized correlation of the central pixel with the surrounding step and the previous time step.
pixels, thus enabling more accurate landslide detection (Soares et al., In RNNs, the recurrent layers (hidden layers) consist of recurrent
2020; Ghorbanzadeh et al., 2019b; Ghorbanzadeh and Blaschke, 2019). cells, where feedback connections between recurrent cells allow for a
Semantic segmentation, a common task for CNN-based models in circular flow of information, which enables it to update its current state
computer vision, is extensively applied in geohazard analysis (Ronne­ based on past data and current input data (see Fig. 6). A basic RNN is
berger et al., 2015; Chen et al., 2018). For example, in semantic seg­ constructed by defining the transition function and the output function
mentation, given a position in the spatial dimension, CNN-based models
(see Eq. (4)). Given the input xt ∈ ℝn×d at time step t, the output ot ∈

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Z. Ma and G. Mei Earth-Science Reviews 223 (2021) 103858

Fig. 5. Network architecture of (a) SegNet and (b) U-Net.

as the hidden state, and three gates control input, output, and memory
states in the memory cell, including an input gate i, a forget gate f, and
an output gate o (see Eqs. (6)–(8)).
it = σ(x
( t ⋅Wx i + ht− 1 ⋅Wh i + bi ))
ft = σ xt ⋅Wx f + ht− 1 ⋅Wh f + bf (6)
ot = σ(xt ⋅Wx o + ht− 1 ⋅Wh o + bo )
{
0 if t = 0
ct = (7)
ct = ft ⊙ ct− 1 + it ⊙ tanh(xt ⋅Wx c + ht− 1 ⋅Wh c + bc ) if t ∕
=0
{
0 if t = 0
Fig. 6. Standard RNN architecture and an unfolded structure. ht = (8)
ot ⊙ tanh(ct ) if t ∕
=0

ℝn×o is obtained by a hidden state ht ∈ ℝn×h , where n denotes the where all W and b denote the weight matrices and biases for the different
number of samples, d denotes the number of inputs for each sample, h gates or the cell, ⊙ indicates the element-wise product.
denotes the number of hidden units (see Eq. (5)) (Schmidt, 2019). GRUs are simplified LSTMs in which the input gates are substituted
{ by update gates z and the forget gates are substituted by reset gates r.
ht =
0 if t = 0
(4) The output gate has been removed, which enables the number of pa­
σ (Wx h ⋅xt + Wh h ⋅ht− 1 + bh ) if t ∕
=0 rameters to be reduced (see Eq. (9) and Eq. (10)).

ot = ht ⋅Wh o + bo (5) rt = σ (xt ⋅Wx r + ht− 1 ⋅Wh r + br )

where σ(⋅) denotes non-linear activation function. The subscript t, x, h,
and o indicate the time step, input layer, hidden layer, and output layer,
respectively. Correspondingly, bh ∈ ℝ1×h denotes the bias of the hidden
layer, bo ∈ ℝ1×o denotes the bias of the output layer; Wx h ∈ ℝd×h de­
notes the weight matrix between the input layer and the hidden layer;
Wh h ∈ ℝh×h denotes the hidden-state-to-hidden-state matrix, which in­
dicates how the hidden variables from the previous time step t − 1 are
employed at the current time step t; and Wh o ∈ ℝh×o denotes the weight
matrix between the hidden layer and the output layer.
There are two main improved variants of RNNs: long short-term
memory (LSTM) networks (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber, 1997) and
gated recurrent units (GRUs) (Chung et al., 2014). Both variants are
designed to address the vanishing gradient problem and to capture
long-term dependencies in sequence data. By using gating mechanisms,
both LSTM and GRUs extract more important information from higher
dimensional data. LSTM introduce a memory cell c with the same shape
zt = σ (xt ⋅Wx z + ht− 1 ⋅Wh z + bz ) (9)
′
ht = tanh(xt ⋅Wx h + (rt ⊙ ht− 1 )⋅Wh h + bh )
{
0 if t = 0
ht = ′ (10)
zt ⊙ ht− 1 + (1 − zt ) ⊙ ht if t ∕
=0
The structures of RNN, LSTM, and GRU are presented in Fig. 7.
Owing to the excellent performance in capturing temporal de­
pendencies, RNN-based models can be employed to predict the evolu­
tion of geological hazards over time, and thus identify underlying risks.
For example, LSTM can predict the displacement of landslides. On the
other hand, as demonstrated in the field of speech recognition, RNN-
based models are also adept at signal processing, which provides great
potential for applications with seismic data.
Furthermore, improvements in the performance of RNN-based
models can be achieved by novel operations emerging in deep
learning, including attention mechanisms and skip connections. For

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Z. Ma and G. Mei
Fig. 7. Structure of (a) RNN cell, (b) LSTM cell and (c) GRU cell.
example, skip connections can be applied when processing seismic
traces by using RNN-based models, to improve the extraction of infor­
mation (Yoon et al., 2020). When using RNN-based models to handle
seismic signals, the employment of attention mechanisms contributes to
the ability of the model to pay attention to more relevant and important
information. For example, leveraging the local attention mechanism
allows the model to capture and exploit local features in the seismic
waveform (Mousavi et al., 2020).
3.4. Deep generative models
3.4.1. Deep belief networks (DBNs)
Deep belief networks (DBNs) are a type of deep learning model that
is stacked by simple neural network restricted Boltzmann machines
(RBMs) (Hinton et al., 2006b). RBMs are composed of a two-layer
network, i.e., a hidden layer h and a visible layer v, where the visible
layer handles the input data, and the hidden layer performs feature
extraction by employing dimensionality reduction and various data
encoding mechanisms (Srivastava and Salakhutdinov, 2014). In a DBN,
each pair of two layers is able to be viewed as an RBM (see Fig. 8) (Wang
et al., 2021b).
Typically, the training process of DBNs is divided into two phases: a
pre-training phase and a discriminative fine-tuning phase. First, a DBN is
pre-trained layer by layer, i.e., several RBMs it contains are trained
sequentially in an unsupervised manner. This learning strategy enables
DBNs to automatically extract increasingly abstract representations
from massive amounts of unlabeled data. Then, in the discriminative
fine-tuning stage, DBNs can perform classification or other tasks on
small, labeled datasets by fine-tuning alone.
During the training process, different from most deep learning
models, DBNs substitute an energy function for the loss function that is
employed for minimization. Thus, the purpose of training is to identify
the parameters that minimize the energy. The energy function is defined
by Eq. (11), where the input data is multiplied by a specified weight W, a
Fig. 8. Structure of (a) RBM and (b) DBN.
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Earth-Science Reviews 223 (2021) 103858
bias b is added to the input value, i denotes the ith visible unit, j denotes
the jth hidden unit, vi and hj represent the state of the corresponding
visible and hidden units, respectively.
∑ ∑ ∑
E(v, h) = − vi hj Wi j − vi ai − hj bj (11)
i,j i j
This distinctive training approach enables DBNs to exhibit the
following advantages: (1) DBNs can avoid the gradient disappearance
problem that can occur when training other deep learning models. (2)
Pre-training of DBNs also avoids over- and under-fitting problems, while
enhancing the generalization of the models. This solution is potentially
appropriate for geological hazard-related tasks with a limited sample
size. (3) The training is rapid, and the computational complexity is
inexpensive. Most importantly, DBNs have excellent feature extraction
capabilities. Therefore, an RBM can extract more important features
from geohazard-related data (e.g., landslide inventories), resulting in
more efficient and accurate performance in specific applications (Ye
et al., 2019).
Currently, DBNs are rarely employed in geohazard scenarios. On the
one hand, classic DBNs are mostly designed to deal with one-
dimensional inputs, whereas geohazard-related tasks involve multiple
inputs (Li et al., 2019). The application of DBNs to geohazard-related
tasks can be challenging due to the complexity of obtaining valuable
information from various inputs. On the other hand, when dealing with
image and time-series data related to geohazards, CNN-based models
and RNN-based models, which are specifically designed to extract the
relevant features of these data, tend to be more widely utilized. There­
fore, it is worth further exploring how effective and applicable DBNs are
for geohazard-related tasks.
3.4.2. Autoencoders (AEs)
AEs are common generative models with a specific encoding and
decoding architecture, which is capable of revealing latent features of
data without any labeling information, and has superior performance in
dimensional reduction and denoising of data (Hinton and Zemel, 1994).
For this reason, this type of deep learning models has been introduced
into current geological hazard analysis, for example achieving efficient
and highly accurate landslide susceptibility assessments from landslide
inventories without labeled information (Huang et al., 2020).
Typically, an AE involves two components, the encoder, and the
decoder, connected by a bottleneck-shaped hidden layer, as illustrated
in Fig. 9. The encoder compresses the data by mapping a given input to
the hidden layer, while the decoder reconstructs an approximation of
the input. Specifically, the encoder is designed to map the input data
x ∈ ℝd , to the latent representation h ∈ ℝp ; the decoder is designed to
map the latent representation h to a reconstructed version x ∈ ℝd . The
′
process is expressed in Eq. (12), where σ(⋅) refers to the activation
function.
Z. Ma and G. Mei
Fig. 9. Structure of (a) AE and (b) VAE.
h = σ (Wx + b)
′ ′ ′ ′ (12)
x = σ (W h + b )
Following a training paradigm that minimizes the loss function ℒ,
the training objective of AEs is learning to produce reconstructed data
that are as similar to the original input as possible. As expressed in in Eq.
(13), an AE tunes parameters (W and b) in training by minimizing a loss
function ℒ (e.g., squared errors).
(13)
′ ′ ′ ′ ′
ℒ(x, x ) = ‖x − x ‖2 = ‖x − σ (W (σ (Wx + b)) + b ) ‖2
The versatility of AEs depends largely on the design of the encoder
and decoder networks. For example, encoders and decoders can be
MLPs, RNNs, or CNNs and to this extent, the flexibility extends the
applicability of AE-based models when confronted with different data
and different tasks. For example, in seismic analysis, an AE-based model
consisting of convolutional layers is employed to extract features from
seismograms and reduce the number of dimensions, thus performing
seismic detection or other tasks (Mousavi et al., 2019b).
Indeed, improvements on the AE-based model are beyond modifying
the network of encoders and decoders. Currently, there are three com­
mon variants of AEs with their own advantages. (1) The denoising
autoencoder (DAE) is designed to recover the original undistorted input
and to obtain a robust representation from corrupted input data (Vincent
et al., 2010). (2) The sparse autoencoder (SAE) is designed to ensure that
the number of active units in the layers is minimal and to learn better
representations, and it can solve the problem that the number of hidden
units exceeds the number of inputs (Makhzani and Frey, 2014). (3) The
variational autoencoder (VAE) is designed to regularize the latent space
to avoid overfitting and ensure that the latent space maintains smooth
properties (Kingma and Welling, 2014). In the VAE model, the encoder
outputs the mean and variance for each latent dimension and samples
from the distribution to generate new data.
Furthermore, AE-based models have the significant advantage of
handling situations where labels in the dataset are imbalanced (Yang
et al., 2021). Imbalanced datasets are common in geological
hazard-related tasks. For example, an AE-based model with excellent
generalization can be obtained by training on remote sensing datasets
that have very limited avalanche events (Sinha et al., 2019b).
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Earth-Science Reviews 223 (2021) 103858
3.4.3. Generative adversarial networks (GANs)
GANs are a type of generative model that employs adversarial
training. Analogous to an AE, a GAN consists of two parts: generators
and discriminators. The generator G is designed to mimic the real data
distribution Pdata (see see Fig. 10). Typically, the generator G generates
samples (the fake data) G(z) from a noise sample z following a prior
noise distribution Pz; while the discriminator D, commonly a binary
classifier, is designed to distinguish between fake data and a real sample
by applying certain functions (e.g., a Sigmoid function).
The adversarial training process for GANs is predicated on the idea of
a zero-sum game, where the generator G and the discriminator D have
ambivalent objectives. On the one hand, the objective of the generator G
is to minimize the probability of the discriminator performing a correct
identification. On the other hand, the objective of the discriminator D is
to maximize the probability of assigning the correct labels to the real
data and fake data. The ultimate objective of the learning process is to
enable the discriminator no longer be able to distinguish real data and
fake data, thus acquiring a competently powered generator G. The
process can be formulated as a mini-max problem (see Eq. (14)), where
argmin is employed for the arguments of the minimum in the objective
function of the generator G, and argmax is employed for the arguments
of the maximum in the objective function of the discriminator D.
G∗ = argminG maxD ℒG AN (G, D) (14)
where ℒG AN (G, D) is the GAN objective function.
ℒG AN (G, D) = Ex∼Pdata logD(x) + Ex∼Pz log(1 − D(G(z))) (15)
Regarding the improvement aspects of GANs, similar to AE-based
models, the two components of GANs can also employ arbitrary deep
learning models, thus achieving better performance in different tasks
based on different data types, by exploiting the characteristics of these
models. It is notable that AE-based models can also serve as generators
or discriminators of GANs.
Furthermore, providing GANs with auxiliary information y (e.g.,
class labels) contributes to improving the performance of GANs. Build­
ing on this idea, one of the most typical variants of GANs, the Condi­
tional GAN (CGAN), was developed. Both the generator and
discriminator of a CGAN are constrained by the auxiliary information,
which not only reduces the stochasticity of the generated data, thus
producing data that adhere to a certain pattern but also accelerates its
training. The objective function of a CGAN is formulated in Eq. (16),
which contains the labels y and the target labels y′ associated with a real
sample x.
( ) [ ( )]
ℒG AN G, D = Ex∼pdata logD x∣y
(16)
+Ez∼pz [log(1 − D(G(z|y' )|y' ) ) ]
The superior generative capability of GANs is usually exploited to
augment training datasets, especially those containing large amounts of
noise or missing values, which are inevitable for geological hazard-
related tasks. Consequently, the current main application for GANs in
geological hazard analysis is the reconstruction of seismic data. For
example, missing seismic traces are interpolated by learning approxi­
mate data distributions from the observed seismic dataset (Alwon,
2019).
3.5. Graph neural networks (GNNs)
In the last few years, GNNs have become among the state-of-the-art
deep learning models (Hamilton et al., 2017; Veličković et al., 2018).
Different from other deep learning models that are adept at capturing
high-level features from hidden Euclidean data (e.g., images, text,
video), GNNs are available for graph-structured data generated in
non-Euclidean domains that represent complex relationships and in­
terdependencies between objects. Most data can be represented as
Z. Ma and G. Mei
Fig. 10. Structure of GAN.
special graph-structured data. For example, for sources of geological
hazard related data, a monitoring system can be considered a graph
where each monitoring device can be considered a node on the graph.
A GNN aggregates a node with its neighbors, and finally obtains a
representation of each node combined with all its neighbors, to perform
further tasks, e.g. classification or regression of node information.
Recently, GNNs have been introduced for geological hazard-related
applications. For example, by representing multiple seismic stations as
graph-structured data, the GNN model can simultaneously conduct
seismic source characterization by adopting data from multiple seismic
stations (van den Ende and Ampuero, 2020).
4. Deep learning for geological hazard analysis: applications
In this section, we focus on deep learning applications in geological
hazard analysis over the last few years for six representative geological
hazards: landslides, debris flows, rockfalls, avalanches, earthquakes,
and volcano activity. For each type of geological hazard, we briefly
Fig. 11. A general workflow of deep learning application for geological hazard analysis.
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outline its characteristics and list the adopted data and deep learning
models. These models aim at solving specified problems in the general
workflow of geological hazard analysis (see Fig. 11).
4.1. Landslide prevention
Landslides are the most common geological hazards; at least 17% of
natural hazard fatalities across the world can be attributed to landslides
(Pourghasemi et al., 2013). Landslides are almost ubiquitous in areas
with slopes and are attributed to multiple interactions between condi­
tioning factors (e.g., soil, rock, and other geological environmental
characteristics) and triggering factors (e.g., weather or seismic) (Froude
and Petley, 2018). Conditioning factors primarily influence the location
of landslides, while triggering factors determine the occurrence of
landslides. They work together to control the extent of the landslide
impact area and the size distribution of the slope damage.
While the major landslide conditions and triggers and the simple
physics behind how they govern landslide occurrence are well known,
Z. Ma and G. Mei Earth-Science Reviews 223 (2021) 103858

predicting when and where landslides will occur remains challenging.
Recent studies have demonstrated that deep learning effectively enables
the identification of landslide-related information from big data; hence,
its combination with earth observation data is a promising potential
solution (Dai et al., 2020).
Substantial and high-quality measurement data are available from
satellite radar and in-situ sensors under the latest advances. The impli­
cation is that deep learning can leverage the aforementioned data to
realize a variety of tasks in landslide research with higher accuracy and
lower cost, such as (1) landslide detection, which is used mainly to ac­
quire interesting landslide information (e.g., landslide characteristics
and size) and facilitate the development of a more detailed landslide
inventory; (2) landslide susceptibility assessment, which is mainly
employed to predict which areas are more susceptible to future land­
slides; and (3) landslide displacement prediction, which is mainly
employed to predict the short-term behavior of landslides. Additional
details are presented in Table 3 (see the table in the appendix).
4.1.1. Landslide detection
The application of deep learning in landslide detection focuses pri­
marily on image analysis. The reason is that landslides severely damage
the surrounding environment, especially the vegetation, thereby
exposing brighter parts of the ground (e.g., rocks and soil), which
changes various properties of the image data in that area. In predisaster
scenarios, deep learning enables the comprehensive detection of active
slopes at a regional scale to identify potential landslides. In postdisaster
scenarios, deep learning enables the rapid acquisition of landslide in­
formation for emergency response.
Furthermore, landslide image analysis includes object-based image
analysis (Martha et al., 2012) and pixel-based image analysis (Danneels

Fig. 12. Deep learning application for landslide detection. (a) Change detection using pre- and post-landslide image data. (b) Objective detection using spectral and
spatial information. (c) Objective detection by applying only optical imagery data. (d) Transfer learning by using pre-trained model. (e) Multi-source information are
stacked as multichannel images for feature extraction by CNN-based model. (f) Feature extraction from multi-source information by employing data fusion. Landslide
images are taken from Ji et al. (2020) and NASA Earth Observatory (2014).

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Z. Ma and G. Mei
et al., 2007). Typically, pixel-based methods recognize landslides on the
basis of the discrepancies between landslide and nonlandslide pixel
features (Lu et al., 2019), which usually detect changes by leveraging
spectral information. Comparatively, object-based classification
methods regarded individual landslides as ‘objects’ and recognize
landslides by simultaneously exploiting spectral and spatial information
(Stumpf and Kerle, 2011). Established deep learning models of change
detection for a landslide mainly utilize pixel-based binary classification
between landslides and their background, namely, semantic segmenta­
tion, where common inputs are raster images with several bands and
labeled pixels.
4.1.1.1. Change detection using pre- and post-landslide image data.
Landslide detection is often considered as a type of land cover change
detection due to the impact of landslide occurrence on the ground sur­
face (Lv et al., 2018). In conventional methods for land cover change
detection, binary thresholds are required to divide the images in terms of
change magnitude, where the determination of the optimal binary
threshold is laborious and subjective (Zanetti and Bruzzone, 2018; Im
et al., 2007). As a data-driven approach, deep learning can avoid
time-consuming preprocessing; it enables direct detection of ‘change’
and ‘no change’ regions without the binary threshold (see Fig. 12a).
Currently, deep learning-based methods have achieved satisfactory
performance in land cover change detection (Khan et al., 2017; Wang
et al., 2019b; Zhang et al., 2016). However, change detection on land­
slides remains a challenge, considering that pre- and post-landslide
images are significantly different from conventional land cover tasks
regarding spectra, moisture, and phenomena.
To solve this, Lv et al. (2020) developed a novel dual-path fully
convolutional network (DP-FCN) that consists of two cooperative
modules with diverse objectives. The first module is an extension of the
U-Net architecture that utilizes four convolutional layers of encoders
and decoders to simultaneously extract high- and low-level features
from dual temporal images. These extracted different features are
concatenated to preserve the details related to landslides in very
high-resolution remote sensing images. Two extracted 3D feature cubes
are then fed into the second module, which utilizes two fully convolu­
tional layers and one dense convolutional layer for joint learning.
Therefore, landslide areas are detected by directly extracting landslide
features from a bitemporal image, which avoids preprocessing opera­
tions, including the calculation of binary thresholds and the generation
of the change magnitude image in traditional methods. Similar to other
deep learning models, DP-FCN requires a large amount of labeled
training data.
Another challenge of change detection for landslides is that landslide
areas suffer from serious spatial uncertainty, which increases the diffi­
culty of extracting effective landslide features from images. To further
improve the accuracy of localization in landslide detection, a deep
learning model (FCN-PP) was developed by Lei et al. (2019). Instead of
employing concatenation, the model introduces a pyramid pooling
module into the fusion of multi-scale features, thus obtaining a more
powerful feature representation. Experimental results demonstrate that
FCN-PP exhibits a robust capability to extract landslide-related spatial
information, and thus achieves better segmentation results in landslide
areas. In this work, time-consuming preprocessing is still required to
filter the large amount of noise contained in the bitemporal images.
From a data-driven perspective, deep learning models trained by
more diverse datasets are another alternative approach to enhance the
performance in change detection. Previous deep learning models
employ only a single band or RGB band as a feature, which can affect the
performance of models for distinguishing ground objects (e.g., soil area)
with spectral or geometrical features that are similar to those of land­
slides. To solve this, Ullo et al. (2019) employed five bands from satellite
images and stacked the pre- and post-disaster images into a CNN model
with nine convolutional layers. As a result, it was revealed that CNN can
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Earth-Science Reviews 223 (2021) 103858
accurately detect landslides even under cloud cover conditions by using
augmented Sentinel-2 images. This finding suggests that an increase in
the number of features has the potential to enhance the distinction be­
tween similar features and thus improve detection accuracy.
Similarly, Wang et al. (2019e) extracted four bands (red, green, blue,
and near-infrared band values) from predisaster and postdisaster remote
sensing images and fused them with NDVI indices. The fused remote
sensing image with nine bands as features is input into a simple CNN
with two convolutional layers and achieves high accuracy and fast
landslide change detection. The results demonstrate that the mixed band
increases the recognition efficiency. Considering that the utilized data­
set is predominantly obtained under conditions of fair weather and
larger vegetation coverage, it is still a challenge to achieve accurate
landslide detection by using satellite images under adverse weather
conditions, e.g., rain and snow.
To further avoid false-positives that are caused by unfavorable fac­
tors (e.g., low resolution, weather effects, and brightness) in optical
images, SAR images can be a compelling solution. However, challenges
remain. SAR images suffer from severe speckle noise, segmentation
target (landslide area) size variation, and image incompleteness, among
other issues.
To address the above problem, An et al. (2020) demonstrated how
different attention modules could be applied in a deep learning model,
for extracting information from SAR images under adverse weather
conditions. In the model, four ResNet blocks are utilized as the backbone
network, and the employed attention modules include (1) an attention
tuning module, which is applied to the first and last ResNet to collect
rich channel information, and (2) a global attention module, which
consists of a position attention module (PAM) and a channel attention
module (CAM). The PAM extracts the global spatial information from
the feature maps of the disaster area (anomaly class) and nondisaster
area (normal class). The CAM efficiently classifies each pixel based on
various features that are generated by the multichannel. The model
achieves accurate segmentation of the landslide area after a rainstorm
by utilizing a three-channel image that is synthesized from three types of
images: pre-disaster SAR, post-disaster SAR, and DEM. As a preliminary
exploration, their approach advances solutions to developing reasonable
models according to different data, and demonstrates that attention
mechanisms can improve information capture to prevent the loss of
valuable information.
Another challenge in applying pixel-based change detection is that
the generation of numerous broken pixel blocks causes the model to
struggle to distinguish between landslides and features that are similar
to landslides. In a novel integrated approach, Shi et al. (2020) treated
landslides as objects with multiple attribute information (e.g., landslide
source and landslide trajectory). The researchers developed an elegant
architecture that contains two CNN models for classification and
object-oriented change detection. The first CNN model with the U-Net
architecture effectively extracts high-level features from historical
landslides. By sharing the weights from the first trained CNN, the second
CNN model uses a Siamese structure to compare the similarity of pre-
and post-landslide images and utilizes a fully connected conditional
random field to refine the boundaries. Furthermore, the framework re­
alizes fast identification of high-resolution aerial landslide images with a
parallel computing training strategy. The framework ingeniously com­
bines deep learning methods with remote sensing processing techniques
to obtain high-quality landslide area segmentation results.
4.1.1.2. Objective detection using spectral and spatial information. Deep
learning models are similarly introduced into objective detection, in
which spectral and spatial information is the foremost data source (see
Fig. 12b). The former is employed to learn features and obtain target
classification results, which include diverse satellite imagery (e.g.,
panchromatic band images and multiple band images); the latter is
employed to target locations and capture contextual information (e.g.,
Z. Ma and G. Mei
morphological features), commonly high-resolution DEM (Guzzetti
et al., 2012). Extracting sufficiently valuable landslide-related infor­
mation from these two data sources is a challenge for objective detection
by applying deep learning models.
As an initial attempt to develop a deep learning-based method for
hyperspectral image landslide detection, Ye et al. (2019) used a DBN
model with three hidden layers to gradually extract high-level features
from hyperspectral images and landslide inventory maps (with infor­
mation on multiple predisposing factors, such as fault zones, earth­
quakes, soil, rivers, roads, rainfall, and vegetation coverage) and utilized
a logistic regression layer that was added at the end of the model for
recognition. The model was applied in the detection of
earthquake-induced landslides and outperformed typical classification
methods (e.g., SVM). Satisfactory experimental results demonstrated the
ability of a DBN to extract deep features of complex data and thus to
obtain spectral-spatial features of the data. Moreover, one advantage of
DBN over other models (e.g., CNN) is that it requires a smaller amount of
training data, and it is able to handle the problem of overfitting small
samples.
Considering that CNNs capture the local correlation of spatial in­
formation due to convolutional operations, they remain an ideal
candidate for handling high-dimensional spatial data in hyperspectral
images. To evaluate the performance of CNN models that utilize spectral
and topographical information as inputs for landslide detection, Ghor­
banzadeh et al. (2019a) utilized CNNs of various depths and input
windows of various sizes for target monitoring, where spectral infor­
mation of five bands and three main topographical information are
stacked as input. A stacking implies that the topographical information
is treated as an additional channel, enabling the dimension of the input
matrix to be a × a × 8, where a × a are window sizes, and 8 is the
number of channels. The results demonstrated that the supplementation
of topographic information contributes to the distinction of subsidence
areas from landslide areas with similar spectral features.
To further improve the performance of the classic CNN model for
landslide detection in study areas, Ghorbanzadeh et al. (2019b)
considered an improved method of obtaining training datasets as a so­
lution, for example, by employing a fishnet tool in ArcGIS software for
sampling. The CNN model achieved an increase in detection accuracy, as
expected. The result implies an appropriate sampling method can enable
the input data to cover more detailed information of a landslide, which
contributes to the feature extraction of the CNN-based model. Further­
more, they compared and analyzed the improved performance of basic
CNN models when adopting patches of various sizes (32 × 32, 48 × 48,
64 × 64, and 80 × 80 pixels). The results reveal that the window size of
the sample patch (i.e., input size of CNN-based models) can significantly
influence the performance of CNN-based models for landslide detection.
Accordingly, improving the sampling method and size of the training
data could be considered for improving the performance of CNN-based
models applied in landslide detection.
Another interesting opportunity would be to explore more archi­
tecture designs, which will facilitate the performance of CNN models in
objective detection. For example, Soares et al. (2020) introduced the
U-Net model to perform the landslide detection. They combined spectral
information that was collected from high-resolution sensors and topo­
graphic information that was provided by DEMs to separate sampled
images into three sizes (32 × 32, 64 × 64 and 128 × 128 pixels). The
satisfactory performance demonstrates that an appropriate architecture
contributes to capturing more meaningful features from optical and
topographical information, achieving highly accurate detection.
For extracting distinctive features of landslides from complicated
backgrounds, Ji et al. (2020) developed a novel 3D attention module
that extracts an integrated spatial and channel attention map to replace
the attention module that processes the channel and spatial attention
maps separately. The proposed module is integrated into CNN landslide
detection models with various architectures, and it was demonstrated
that the attention module significantly improved the performance of the
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CNN model while utilizing a combination of DEM topographical infor­
mation and spectral information of optical images as input, where
ResNet-50 realized the most accurate detection.
Moreover, the high-resolution DEM that is derived from LiDAR
provides more complementary information on the bare ground topog­
raphy. For example, Prakash et al. (2020) stacked multiple landslide
topographic features that were extracted from radar DEM images and
multiple spectral features of landslides that were extracted from optical
images and fed them into a modified U-Net architecture (with ResNet34
blocks in its downsampling path). Semantic segmentation of landslides
at a regional scale was effectively performed.
In practice, landslide datasets typically suffer from an unbalanced
class distribution, where more pixels belong to background objects (e.g.,
vegetation, urban area, and water). To reduce the class imbalance be­
tween positive and negative classes, Yu et al. (2020) designed a CNN
model for contour-based semantic segmentation that consists of
ResNet-101 and a pyramid pool module by extending the pyramid scene
parsing network (PSPNet). On national scales, PSPNet can effectively
detect landslides in the case of an imbalanced data distribution. It pro­
vides a practical solution for the supplementation of landslide databases
in countries that lack data.
As illustrated in Fig. 12e, the above study shows that spectral layers
and topographical layers (e.g., elevation, slope, and curvature) are
directly stacked to form a ‘multichannel image’ as regular input to a
CNN-based model, which can effectively detect landslides. Furthermore,
data fusion is a method that is available for further improving the model
performance (see Fig. 12f). Consequently, Sameen and Pradhan (2019)
proposed a novel feature-level fusion method that converts spectral data
and terrain variables into an abstract representation by using a neural
network and fuses them using various operations (e.g., activation
functions). The fused data are fed into a CNN model with residual blocks
for detection. The method implements the extraction of complementary
features from spectral (RGB bands) and topographic information (alti­
tude, slope, aspect, and curvature) to detect landslides more effectively.
During a postdisaster emergency response, it is difficult to collect
high spatial resolution DEM images within a limited time. For remote
mountain areas with complicated topography, this scenario is especially
difficult. One solution is to perform high-precision landslide detection
by applying only optical imagery data (Fig. 12c). For example, Qi et al.
(2020) developed a CNN model (ResU-Net) with a U-Net architecture
and 56 convolutional layers, where residual blocks are employed as an
alternative to each convolutional layer in the encoding path of the
original U-Net model. This modification avoids model degradation
(deterioration of model predictions over time for similar data), thereby
enabling ResU-Net to accurately detect landslides from optical images
alone. Yi and Zhang (2020) developed a novel end-to-end CNN model,
namely, LandsNet, that adds a residual block and attention module
along with multiscale fusion operations. Consequently, it can accurately
recognize and map landslides from single-temporal optical satellite
images.
In summary, the most commonly employed deep neural networks for
object detection tasks in landslides are ResNet and U-Net, which
improve the accuracy of detection by extracting more valuable
landslide-related information from the input data. The elegant archi­
tecture and the high-quality data contribute to the accuracy and
robustness of landslide detection. However, challenges remain because
high-quality data is not always immediately available.
4.1.1.3. Transfer learning to overcome limited samples. The detection of
landslides via feature extraction from high-resolution images requires
many samples due to large spatial-spectral variations. However, the
collected image data are typically insufficient for training a deep
learning model. Even trainable deep learning models are potentially
affected by model degradation (deterioration of model predictions over
time for the same/similar data).
Z. Ma and G. Mei
To overcome the challenges posed by limited samples, transfer
learning, which specializes in small sample problems, has also been
introduced as a promising solution for landslide detection with a small
number of images (Ghorbanzadeh et al., 2019a; Ding et al., 2017) (see
Fig. 12d). For example, Ullo et al. (2020) employed a pretrained Mask
R-CNN model (an object detection model that can draw a bounding box
that surrounds the objects) to perform transfer learning to extract
landslides in terrain with minimal landslide photographs. By utilizing
ResNet as the backbone network of the developed models, the result
demonstrates that the employment of transfer learning and an appro­
priate architecture effectively improves the performance of detection
models that have limited input samples. This work is that the training
images still require manual annotation before training, which is a
time-consuming process.
Similarly, Lu et al. (2020) utilized a CNN-based model (ImageNet) to
recognize landslides from image data and used a feature transfer
learning approach to obtain a pre-trained model. To address the problem
that the classification results of pre-trained models are commonly
inconsistent with the real boundary of the landslide area, this work
combines ImageNet with object-oriented image analysis methods, which
increases the accuracy of the deep learning model segmentation.
For training small samples, the proposed transfer learning-based
approach has achieved satisfactory performance. However, when
applied to detect earthquake-induced rock landslides, some exposed
rocks are incorrectly classified as landslides by the model, because the
spectral and structural characteristics of rock landslides are closely
similar to those of bare rocks. Furthermore, the spectral characteristics
of landslides are also misclassified by the model due to their similarity to
bare ground. This factor will limit the accuracy of this work.
When applying transfer learning, it is another interesting opportu­
nity to explore different CNN architectures for improving the accuracy
of landslide detection. For example, Catani (2021) utilized four pur­
portedly best-performing CNN architectures as pre-trained classifiers,
including GoogLeNet, GoogLeNet-places365, ResNet, and Inception.v3.
The performance of these architectures demonstrated that the first two
are compact and fast, with a time-saving advantage, whereas the latter
two are more accurate. Despite the satisfactory performance achieved,
this work suffers from classification errors, especially regarding land­
slide false negatives. Therefore, considering that the ultimate objective
of this work is to incorporate the pre-trained models into UAV systems,
for the purpose of real-time landslide mapping and investigation of
specific landslide-related topographic features, it is imperative to reduce
the false alarm rate and increase the reliability of the employed
methods. Therefore, it remains a challenge to improve the prediction
accuracy of deep learning models when employing transfer learning.
Collectively, these deep learning-based landslide detection methods
demonstrate that deep learning models can achieve accurate segmen­
tation of landslide areas, which mainly depend on model improvements
and data processing improvements. In terms of model design, deep
learning models based on U-Net and ResNet architectures have
demonstrated excellent information extraction capabilities, thus
achieving high accuracy segmentation results. Novel deep neural net­
works, e.g., attention blocks, are also increasingly favored, which can
further enable the extraction of valuable information. In terms of data
processing, it is interesting to further explore on how to process data in a
more time-efficient and cost-effective approach, thus allowing these
data to provide more geohazard-related information for deep learning
models. Moreover, the deployment of pretrained models could be a
promising trend, for example, their application in UAVs.
4.1.2. Landslide susceptibility assessment
Landslide susceptibility assessment is to predict whether an area is
prone to geological hazards according to given data from an inventory
(Guzzetti et al., 1999). The adopted data usually includes multiple
environmental factors of a geological hazard as well as a historical re­
cord of its own occurrence.
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In the last few years, various basic deep learning models have been
gradually introduced into landslide susceptibility assessment, which
includes MLP, CNN, RNN, and AE. These models can automatically
extract high-level features from different data representations and ach­
ieve significant performance in landslide susceptibility evaluation. The
general workflow of the aforementioned models is illustrated in Fig. 13.
As one of the simplest and most basic deep learning models, the MLP
model has been used to replace the traditional statistical and machine
learning models in landslide susceptibility assessment. The model out­
performs other traditional models in prediction and is unaffected by the
landslide sampling method (Hua et al., 2021; Bui et al., 2020; Dou et al.,
2020; Dao et al., 2020). As a general rule, a reasonable design of
hyperparameters and optimization algorithms improves the perfor­
mance of a model. From a comparison of three optimization algorithms,
Nhu et al. (2020) concluded that Adam algorithm is suitable for
obtaining improved prediction results for MLP models in landslide sus­
ceptibility assessment.
Due to convolutional operations, CNNs can capture the contextual
information in the input data, thus achieving a powerful feature
extraction performance. For landslide sensitivity assessment, CNNs are
also an excellent deep learning models for extracting valuable features
directly from the raw data, and it is capable of eliminating the
cumbersome traditional feature selection process. However, a number of
discrepancies exist between landslide susceptibility assessment and
image processing. Consequently, to exploit the feature capturing capa­
bility of CNNs effectively, the processing of landslide data into appro­
priate data representations poses a major challenge for introducing CNN
models into landslide susceptibility assessments.
As a first exploration, Wang et al. (2019d) applied three vanilla CNN
architectures (1D, 2D, and 3D-CNN) to the corresponding data repre­
sentations, which were transformed from the original landslide data. For
example, the 3D data representation means that the input data is rep­
resented as a 3D matrix with dimensions c × n × n, where c indicates the
number of landslide influencing factors, and n indicates the rows and
columns of each data layer. The experimental results demonstrate that
the feature extraction capability of CNNs exceeds that of conventional
machine learning methods (SVM), and thus can be applied to develop
reliable landslide sensitivity maps.
Similarly, Fang et al. (2020) treated multiple landslide inventory
maps that were stacked together as a ‘multichannel image’, where each
channel denotes a single predisposing factor, and input this ‘image’ into
a 1D-CNN to capture local representations among landslide features.
This is a hybrid model where CNN is simply employed to extract fea­
tures, and traditional machine learning methods are employed as clas­
sifiers. The experimental results indicate that this hybrid model achieves
higher classification accuracy than the single CNN model.
However, many challenges remain because that the occurrence of
landslides is not only related to the landslide, but also closely related to
the surrounding environment of the landslide. To enhance the accuracy
of landslide susceptibility assessment, the CNN-based approach requires
consideration of multi-scale spatial information around landslides or
non-landslides. To address this problem, Yi et al. (2020) proposed a
multi-scale sampling strategy, based on the assumption of spatial auto­
correlation, to fuse abundant spatial information, thereby generating a
multiscale dataset. The dataset was applied to the vanilla CNN archi­
tecture, and the results confirmed that the generated multiscale data
facilitated the CNN model to automatically extract various deep fea­
tures, thus improving the accuracy of landslide susceptibility maps.
Furthermore, existing CNN models employed for landslide suscep­
tibility mapping are relatively simple, and the extracted features do not
involve any localization information. As an improvement to the basic
CNN architecture, Hajimoradlou et al. (2020) introduced U-Net for
feature extraction in landslide susceptibility assessments. The developed
model can track the surface and align it with the ground contours to
extract relevant spatial features. Finally, an effective susceptibility
assessment map is generated.
Z. Ma and G. Mei
Environmental
factors
Landuse
Rainfall
Soil
TWI
Lithology
Aspect
Slope
1D data
Output
Landslide Non-landslide
Landslide Susceptibility Map
Very low
Low
Moderate
High
Very High
Fig. 13. A general workflow of deep learning application for landslide susceptibility assessment.
Deep learning models such as CNNs involve many hyperparameters,
including batch size, learning rate, and number of hidden layers. A
reasonable selection of these hyperparameters is therefore also an
important challenge to improve the accuracy of landslide susceptibility
assessments. Sameen et al. (2020) utilized Bayesian optimization to
determine the hyperparameters. The results indicate that Bayesian
optimization improves the accuracy of the employed classic CNN by 3%.
Furthermore, Pham et al. (2020) introduced a moth flame optimization
(MFO) algorithm into a CNN model that was designed for landslide
susceptibility assessments to search for optimal hyperparameters.
Another common deep learning model, namely, RNN, has been
introduced into landslide susceptibility assessments. Since the RNN
model was developed for handling sequence data, the problem to be
considered is how to convert the landslide data into sequential data
applicable to the model. For example, Mutlu et al. (2019) provided a
solution, they constituted a sequence by combining previously processed
landslide occurrence information with the current location information
and fed it into an RNN for further prediction. Moreover, Wang et al.
(2020b) stacked predisposing factors into a sequence and sorted them
according to importance. This method enabled the predisposing factors
to be sequentially fed into the RNN model according to their importance;
thus, critical information that contributes to landslide identification
could be fully utilized. To further explore this issue, Thi Ngo et al. (2021)
employed a basic CNN model and a basic RNN model for mapping
landslide sensitivity on a national scale, respectively. The comparison of
the experimental results revealed that the RNN obtained better perfor­
mance than the CNN. More work is still expected to apply RNN-based
models for landslide susceptibility assessments, for example, to
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Data representations
One-hot
2D data 3D data
Sequence data Sorted sequence data
Deep learning models
Simple CNN
Simple RNN
develop more data representations suitable for the model or to improve
the model architecture.
In addition to supervised deep learning models, various unsuper­
vised deep learning models are applied to landslide susceptibility
assessment. These models can fully utilize the high sparsity and
nonlinear correlation of landslide features to extract high-level features.
As an example, Huang et al. (2020) developed a model, namely, a fully
connected sparse AE (FC-SAE). This model extracts the optimal features
from predisposing factors without considering a priori assumptions
based on the existence of a linear correlation between them. It is not
necessary to provide external labels for the landslide information.
Similarly, Nam and Wang (2020) integrated AE models (stacked AEs
(StAEs) or sparse AEs (SpAEs)) into conventional machine learning
models (random forest and support vector machine) and, thus, realized
better predictive performance by capturing more meaningful feature
representations. The major advantage of the AE-based approach is that it
does not require external labels for landslide information. Moreover, it
reduces the computational cost by reducing the dimensionality of the
landslide data. These advantages are expected to expand the scope of
application and thus facilitate the application of AE-based models in
landslide susceptibility assessments.
4.1.3. Landslide displacement prediction
Deformation prediction is also a major application scenario for deep
learning in landslides prevention. Deformation prediction focuses on the
short term behavior of landslides and provides an important basis for
landslide early warning systems. Typically, early warning systems are
used to provide actionable warning information in advance of a
Z. Ma and G. Mei
landslide, thereby mitigating potentially significant damage (Piciullo
et al., 2018).
As a nonlinear dynamic process under the control of a complicated
environment, in landslide deformation, the influencing factors and
deformation behavior at the previous moment impact the deformation
behavior at the next moment (Xu and Niu, 2018). Consequently, deep
learning is an ideal tool for capturing high-level temporal correlations
from complex, highly nonlinear, and variable field monitoring data to
realize more accurate displacement prediction. A commonly applied
paradigm is introduced as follows (see the workflow in Fig. 14).
First, a few field-specific monitoring points are selected, and the
collected time series data are denoised (e.g., via wavelet transform) and
decomposed into several components according to influencing factors.
Second, a deep learning model is applied to predict the displacement of
the landslide in the short term. Upon completion of the prediction,
various methods are employed to determine the alarm threshold.
Suitable models can increase the accuracy of deformation prediction.
As the most popular model for predicting sequential data, RNN and its
variants are preferred for displacement prediction. Typically, an LSTM
model is introduced to predict dynamic landslide displacement by
adopting data that are decomposed into static and dynamic components
(Xu and Niu, 2018; Xie et al., 2019; Yang et al., 2019; Jiang et al., 2020;
Xing et al., 2020). Furthermore, other deep learning models are avail­
able. For example, Li et al. (2020) employed a DBN model to extract
reservoir landslide displacement-related features from three denoised
time-series datasets (reservoir landslide displacements, monthly pre­
cipitation, and reservoir water level) without prior knowledge and
realized satisfactory predictive performance. This work does not
consider RNN and its related variants as a benchmark. Theoretically,
Fig. 14. A general workflow of deep learning application for landslide displacement prediction.
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although DBNs can extract relevant features from deformation data with
high nonlinearity and variability, it is difficult to capture the temporal
dependence of these time-series data. More comparisons are necessary.
Reasonable application of diverse data can further improve the
performance of deep learning models in deformation prediction. For
instance, Meng et al. (2020) compared the LSTM model performance
when adopting single-factor (cumulative displacement time-series)
versus multifactor prediction (reservoir landslide displacements,
monthly precipitation, and reservoir water level) and demonstrated that
the latter reduces overfitting and increases the accuracy. Other influ­
encing factors outside of precipitation and reservoir levels still need to
be introduced into predicting landslide displacement behavior. Fusing
these features into deep learning models to improve the accuracy of
predicting landslide displacements is an impending and exciting
challenge.
4.2. Debris flow investigation
A ‘debris flow’ is a geological hazard in which large quantities of
highly concentrated, nonplastic, saturated debris rapidly flow through a
steep channel (Hungr et al., 2014). When a debris flow occurs, it de­
stroys all objects in its path and, thus, causes substantial damage. Debris
flows, which occur worldwide, often occur without any indication
(Coussot and Meunier, 1996). Therefore, there are few applications of
deep learning in the debris flow investigation.
For debris flow investigation, the assessment of susceptibility is a
typical task that contributes to regional debris flow monitoring and early
warning. Inspired by a common application paradigm of deep learning
models in landslide susceptibility assessment, Zhang et al. (2019b)
Z. Ma and G. Mei
introduced classic MLP and CNN-based models into debris flow sus­
ceptibility assessment, where 15 external factors that are associated
with debris flow hazard events were utilized as a one-dimensional vector
input, and they effectively assessed the probability of debris flow
occurrence in a specified region.
On the other hand, the immediate availability of information related
to debris flows can contribute to debris flow investigations, including
the response to debris flow emergencies, which is essential for rescue
and mitigation activities. Ideally, for example, spatial information on
debris flows can be obtained through CNN-based models by utilizing
data from satellite images. However, the available data for model
training are difficult to obtain. Multispectral imagery tends to be
disturbed by weather, while high-resolution SAR images that are im­
mune to weather effects are quite expensive.
To overcome these limitations, Yokoya et al. (2020) proposed an
impressive solution, where numerical simulation techniques are
exploited to alleviate the requirements for remote sensing data. In a
comprehensive framework, they ingeniously combined numerical
simulation methods with CNN-based models (LinkNet). In this work,
numerical simulation methods generated large amounts of synthetic
data by simulating debris flow hazard scenarios, which satisfy the
training requirements of the CNN-based model. After sufficient training,
once the remote sensing images have been fed into the model, detailed
information regarding topographic deformation can be rapidly ob­
tained. The encouraging results show promising opportunities for
combining numerical simulation methods with deep learning models.
Additional details are presented in Table 4 (see the table in the
appendix).
4.3. Rockfall detection
As a geological hazard that occurs with high frequency, rockfall
occurs when the rock and soil mass on a steep slope experiences a local
slip or break phenomenon, and its dynamics include free-falling, rolling,
bouncing, and sliding motions (Dorren, 2003). Few studies have been
conducted using deep learning on rockfall due to its rapidity, lack of
readily identifiable precursors, sudden collapse, and complex
mechanism.
Several deep learning models have been applied in rockfall detection
on the Moon and Mars with the objective of elucidating the geological
processes on the surfaces of the planets, which provide potential support
for future applications of deep learning on earth rockfalls.
For example, Bickel et al. (2020a) introduced a CNN model (Reti­
naNet) with multiple convolutional layers and residual blocks that could
capture invariant and distinguishing features (e.g., albedo, shadows, and
light shadows) and produce bounding boxes or segregated masks around
the detections. Accordingly, detection contains two major stages. First,
manually labeled images are scanned, and rectangular boxes are utilized
to identify candidate regions in the images where features are likely to
be detected. Second, the candidate regions are classified. Furthermore,
the image data must be of sufficient resolution for the detection of
meter-scale damage. The method benefits from the high-quality data
that are collected by reconnaissance orbiter cameras and thus effectively
identifies rockfalls and generates large-scale rockfall maps with optimal
efficiency and speed. The satisfactory performance of this deep learning
detection paradigm has been proven for rockfalls on the Moon (Bickel
et al., 2019) and Mars (Bickel et al., 2020b).
Additional details are presented in Table 5 (see the table in the
appendix).
4.4. Avalanche detection
An avalanche is a rapid, massive movement of snow along a hillside
or slope that occurs in snow-covered mountains throughout the world
(Eckerstorfer et al., 2019). Over the past four decades, approximately
100 people have been killed in avalanches each year in the European
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Alps (Techel et al., 2015). It is estimated that the economic cost of road
closures and infrastructure damage in Europe exceeds one billion Euros
annually (Rudolf-Miklau et al., 2015).
Therefore, reliable investigation for avalanche activities has signifi­
cant socioeconomic implications for people who live in snow-covered
mountain areas. On the one hand, these investigations assist in
avalanche risk mitigation by estimating the stability of snowpack and
the variability of avalanche activity; on the other hand, they can furnish
valuable information on climate change.
Substantial time consumption, high expense, impassable accessi­
bility, and avalanche danger constrain the traditional field measurement
methods available for avalanche activity investigations. Fortunately, the
development of satellite remote sensing has improved the current ability
to achieve continuous monitoring of avalanche activity in spatial and
temporal terms. Considering that spatial and temporal data related to
avalanche activity can further improve the identification of avalanche
risk zones and avalanche periods, SAR is a desirable data source.
An advantage of SAR products is being able to continuously cover
large areas without being affected by light and meteorological condi­
tions, which is consequently available for detecting avalanche debris.
However, conventional segmentation methods that capture only pixel-
wise features in radar backscatter tend to incur a large number of false
positives, and thus are ineffective in avalanche detection.
To improve the accuracy of avalanche detection, it is desirable to
explore automated methods, which can capture background information
around pixels and high-level features (e.g., shape and texture) of
avalanche debris. Fortuitously, this is exactly where deep learning
models, especially CNN-based models, have expertise.
In a work that employed the transfer learning strategy, based on a
pre-trained CNN-based model (ResNet) trained with a natural image
dataset, Waldeland et al. (2018) demonstrated the effectiveness of deep
learning techniques for classifying avalanches in SAR images. The work
is divided into a two-stage process, where deep learning techniques are
applied in the second stage. In the second stage, a pre-trained ResNet is
responsible for identifying whether candidate regions selected by
traditional methods contain avalanches. To enable SAR images to be
effectively utilized by pre-trained models that specialize in standard
RGB images, an interesting solution has been proposed in this work. The
five channels of the input image are converted into three channels via
various combinations, where the red channel corresponds to the
avalanche event image and the green and blue channels to the reference
image.
Furthermore, other than information from SAR images, can addi­
tional information improve the performance of CNN-based models in
detecting avalanches? To explore this possibility, Sinha et al. (2019a)
applied SAR data and an independent avalanche inventory as input to a
pre-trained CNN-based model (VGG-16). The inventory is collected from
in-situ observations of mountain corridors where avalanches have
occurred, which covers the occurrence of avalanches, and both quanti­
tative and qualitative data. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of
CNN-based models for automatic avalanche debris detection, by
combining multiple sources of information. It also reveals that
avalanche-related characteristics affect the performance of the deep
learning model, for example, the size of the avalanche debris.
The utilization of deep learning based on multisource information for
effective avalanche detection is inspiring. The exploration of diverse
input information is expected to continually open up further opportu­
nities to enhance the performance of the CNN-based models in
avalanche detection. For example, as one of the most important factors
that contribute to the occurrence of avalanches, topography can provide
multiple pieces of information to CNN-based models in the forms of
slopes, slope directions, or other DEM-derived feature maps.
By exploiting this additional information, Bianchi et al. (2021)
applied a CNN-based model (U-Net) for determining whether an indi­
vidual pixel corresponds to an avalanche, where inputs consist of SAR
images and two feature maps from the DEM. Two additional
Z. Ma and G. Mei
topographical feature maps are obtained from the DEM image: the slope
angle feature and the angle of reach. The former is provided to the model
as an additional layer of the input image, while the latter is utilized to
generate an attention mask from an attention block that contains three
stacked convolutional layers. The utilization of the attention module
enables the model to concentrate more on easy-to-overlook avalanche
regions.
Overall, CNN-based models have typically served as classifiers in
avalanche detection. For real-world applications, this kind of classifier
tends to suffer from the extreme imbalance in the dataset, which
significantly compromises its classification accuracy. As revealed by
Bianchi et al. (2021), a common solution that modifies the loss function
during model training cannot alleviate the class imbalance problem in
avalanche detection. More approaches are expected to address this
challenge.
AE-based models are an interesting alternative that can identify
anomalies by comparing the compressed-reconstructed data with the
original data. This capability enables it to be employed in anomaly
detection of rare events, and has achieved impressive performance. In
the case of extremely imbalanced avalanche data, the avalanche can be
considered the anomaly event, thus rendering avalanche detection into
an anomaly detection. Building on this idea, Sinha et al. (2019b)
demonstrated that the AE-based model (VAE) can be an excellent tool
for high accuracy avalanche detection and is able to outperform
CNN-based models.
Additional details are presented in Table 6 (see the table in the
appendix).
4.5. Earthquake analysis
Earthquakes, which are phenomena in which the Earth's surface
suddenly shakes violently, are typically caused by the sudden release of
accumulated stresses within the Earth under the tectonic driving forces
of plate motion and mountain building. According to the World Health
Organization, earthquakes were responsible for nearly 750,000 deaths
and affected more than 125 million people worldwide during 1998 ~
2017.
To mitigate the social and economic consequences of a damaging
earthquake, over the past 10 years, improvements in seismometer
design, installation, and network density have enhanced the earthquake
hazard monitoring capability. Moreover, the large amount of data that is
generated lay the foundation for improved studies of the detailed
structure and physical properties of the Earth's deeper interior.
Collected seismograms provide many signal records that are associ­
ated with the Earth's motion (displacement, velocity, or acceleration)
over time and, thus, reflect the influence of the combination from the
source, the propagation path, the characteristics of the recording in­
struments, and the environmental noise that results from the conditions
at the recording location. These signals are typically ordered time series
that consist of diverse local features (e.g., P-wave and S-wave) and
global features (e.g., ground waves and scattered waves). Depending on
the polarization patterns, P-waves are more highlighted on the vertical
component seismograms, whereas S-waves are more highlighted on the
horizontal component seismograms.
Ideally, each channel (seismic trace) is composed of a wavelet that
corresponds to the arrival time of the signal. In practice, the arrival
signal is subject to random background oscillations as a result of noise
(Arora et al., 2011). All unwanted recorded energy that contaminates
seismic data can be considered seismic noise. To avoid the effects of
noise and to obtain clean, noise-free, high-quality seismic images,
seismic data must be processed carefully. The quality of seismic data can
be assessed based on the signal-to-noise ratio, the increase of which
implies an improvement in data quality.
Given its substantial potential to automate the processing and anal­
ysis of large amounts of seismic data, deep learning is attracting
tremendous research interests in the field of seismology; as a result, it
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has been rapidly developed in various research directions, such as
seismic data interpolation and denoising, seismic phase picking, earth­
quake detection, localization, earthquake characterization, and focal
mechanisms.
Additional details are presented in Table 7 (see the table in the
appendix).
4.5.1. Seismic data interpolation and denoising
The raw seismic records that are collected are subject to environ­
mental and economic constraints, which lead to irregular sampling and,
thus, the presence of erroneous or missing traces. These incomplete
seismic data directly affect the quality of data processing, which further
affects the accuracy of downstream tasks.
To improve the quality of seismic data, the effective implementation
of seismic data interpolation is a major challenge. Seismic data inter­
polation is an essential method for reconstructing missing traces, which
is a prerequisite for improving other data processing and analysis tasks
in seismic research. Another major challenge is denoising, which in­
volves separating the noise from the seismic signal or attenuating it.
Existing traditional interpolation methods (e.g., interpolation based
on sparse mathematical transformations) are limited to random missing
scenarios, and struggle to handle regular missing scenarios. To address
this dilemma, deep learning models serve as a solution by virtue of their
advantages in automatic feature extraction. As a preliminary explora­
tion, Wang et al. (2018) addressed seismic data interpolation as an
image reconstruction problem, and employed a CNN-based model
(ResNet) to perform anti-aliasing interpolation of regular missing
seismic traces (see Fig. 15a). Trained and evaluated with synthetic data
and observed data, they demonstrated that ResNet is effective in
generating regularly missing data and that the model has robust
generalization performance. This work confirms that CNN-based models
can eliminate the linearity, sparsity, and low-order assumptions of
traditional algorithms, and extract higher-order features of the training
data, thus allowing the interpolated data to be closer to the true
measurements.
Following the basic idea of regarding seismic data as images, a more
ingenious approach is to combine CNN-based models with generative
models that specialize in data reconstruction. It is exactly the work done
by Mandelli et al. (2019). They deployed an AE-based model that
combines AE with U-Net, considering that the encoding and decoding
structure of U-Net typically contributes to maintaining the integrity of
the data, resulting in highly accurate reconstructions. By experimenting
on synthetic and field data, this hybrid model can reconstruct clean and
densely sampled gathers in a more efficient and accurate manner.
To further improve the reconstruction accuracy of U-Net, an increase
in the number of hidden layers is desirable. Nevertheless, deeper deep
learning models potentially could experience gradient vanishing, which
may cause ineffective model training. To avoid this problem, Tang et al.
(2020) added residual blocks to the deep U-Net (ResU-Net). The model is
designed mainly for processing seismic data acquired by sparse 2D
acquisition. On 2D seismic data, ResU-Net demonstrates its robustness in
reconstructing random and regular missing traces by capturing more
information, which also simplifies training.
Furthermore, a deep learning model with high generalization per­
formance is expected, which would preserve robust data processing
capabilities in various scenarios. DeepDenoiser, developed by Zhu et al.
(2019b), appears to be an example for this purpose. The model, inspired
by the basic AE, consists of a series of fully convolutional layers to form a
descending-then-ascending encoding-decoding architecture, which
contains a large number of skip structures, allowing it to learn the fea­
tures from not only seismic signals, but also various noise sources. By
learning the sparse representation of seismic data in the time-frequency
domain, the model decomposes the input data into signals of interest
and noise. The results demonstrate that DeepDenoiser has remarkably
promising generalization performance and can handle white noise,
various colored noises, non-seismic signals well, and even signals other
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Fig. 15. Deep learning application for seismic data interpolation and denoising. (a) The CNN-based and RNN-based model for reconstructing seismic data with
missing traces. (b) CGAN for reconstructing seismic data with missing traces.
than seismic data. The effectiveness of DeepDenoiser portends the great
potential of AE-based models in seismic data denoising. Furthermore,
the performance of such models in seismic data interpolation deserves
more exploration.
The strategy of treating seismic data as images sufficiently exploits
the advantages of CNN-based deep learning models, and it is a motiva­
tion to investigate a similar approach. Another interesting opportunity is
to consider seismic data as time series, and thus RNN-based deep
learning models can be utilized to manipulate seismic data. Following
this idea, Yoon et al. (2020) attempted to implement the reconstruction
of seismic data by leveraging five RNN-based deep learning models
(basic RNN, LSTM, bidirectional LSTM, deep BiLSTM, and DBiLSTM
with skip connections). In this work, the traces of seismic data are
considered time series to be fed into the model, thus completing the
prediction of the missing traces between two existing input traces.
Although the results are satisfactory, RNN-based deep learning models
have difficulty capturing the spatial correlation of different traces from
seismic data and handling a large number of input traces
simultaneously.
Alternatively, can seismic data be considered a data distribution?
Seismic data may have a known data distribution. As a typical genera­
tive model, GAN is exactly designed to learn the data distribution,
meaning that GAN is able to generate new seismic data by fully sum­
marizing the data distribution. The generated seismic data share
mathematical distributions and features similar to the raw data. When
missing data can also be generated based on a certain data distribution,
GAN is very promising for seismic data interpolation (see Fig. 15b).
By experimenting on various types of datasets (including 2D short
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acquisition data or 3D field data), Kaur et al. (2020) achieved the
reconstruction of missing traces on seismic data by leveraging the
cycleGAN model. Apparently, the missing seismic data indeed have a
similar mathematical distribution as the observed seismic data, and GAN
can learn these latent features to reconstruct the missing seismic data.
The cycleGAN as a classic GAN model suffers from limitations, such as
the vulnerability to model collapse during training (i.e., a form of failure
of the GAN model). More improvements, or the introduction of more
GAN models into seismic data interpolation tasks, are desirable.
The capabilities of GANs in seismic data processing have been
extended by employing more state-of-the-art models. For example,
Alwon (2019) developed the generative adversarial noise attenuation
network (GANAN), inspired by conditional style transfer type networks.
The generator network is a U-Net based architecture, and the architec­
ture allows for the preservation of high-level details of the input shot by
utilizing skip connections. The results demonstrate that GANAN can
convert noisy images to clear images and thus achieve the denoising of
seismic data.
A limitation of most GANs is the inability to control the class of the
generated data. To improve this situation, as an extension to GANs,
CGANs can perform conditional generation of seismic data based on
random noise and given conditions. For common CGANs, the objective
of adding random noise is to enable the generated images with different
styles given identical conditions. For CGANs intended for seismic data
interpolation, a common practice is to not add random noise, consid­
ering that seismic data with missing traces require certain interpolation
results.
As an initial attempt, Oliveira et al. (2018) employed CGAN to
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generate missing data for portions or entire regions in seismic images. As
illustrated in Fig. 15b, in this work, the generator is fed an image x with
a missing seismic trace within a certain width, and then attempts to
generate an image g(x). The discriminator attempts to accurately classify
a set of fake images (x and g(x)) and a set of real images (x and the
original complete image y). The model can eventually generate data that
are highly consistent with the original seismic data.
To extend seismic data to the frequency domain and thus achieve
improved fidelity in interpolation, Chang et al. (2020) proposed a GAN
(DD-CGAN) to interpolate seismic data in the time and frequency do­
mains. After enhancing the frequency domain properties by employing
Fourier transform, the proposed model generates data by utilizing
ResNet as a conditional network. The reconstructed seismic data share a
similar amplitude in the time domain and a similar spectral distribution
in the frequency domain. This implies that the reconstructed seismic
traces can achieve high consistency with the actual traces, thus contin­
uously obtaining the fidelity of the interpolated seismic data.
The challenge of utilizing GANs for seismic data is derived from the
Fig. 16. Deep learning application for (a) seismic phase picking, (b) classification of seismic signal and noise, (c) seismic event detection, (d) earthquake charac­
terization and (e) focal mechanisms investigation.
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inherent characteristics of the GAN model. First, compared with other
deep learning models, GAN has two sets of deep neural networks, the
generator and the discriminator, which indicates that it may contain
tens to hundreds of millions of parameters, and thus requires high
computational costs. One solution is the utilization of low-frequency
data at large spatial sampling rates and decimated trace counts
(Alwon, 2019). Second, the training of GANs is prone to failures, e.g.,
model collapse, and a solution is to replace the loss function with
Wasserstein loss (Wei et al., 2021).
4.5.2. Seismic phase picking
Seismic phase picking, or arrival time measurement, is valuable for
locating events and analyzing the source mechanism for identifying
events. Typically, automatic phase picking involves identifying the
arrival time of a single phase as quickly and accurately as possible, such
as the first P-wave arrival (see Fig. 16a).
Traditional phase picking methods require human experts to observe
the entire waveform and provide results. However, the amount of data
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that are generated by the seismic community has increased dramatically
in the last decade. Hence, manual picking will not be able to handle
large-scale datasets. Due to its robust capability in handling large
amounts of data, deep learning is a suitable alternative for handling
massive data and realizing accurate identification. Among many models,
the CNN model is preferred due to its significant advantages in pattern
recognition and its ability to maintain invariance under distortion (e.g.,
translation and scaling).
When introducing CNN-based models, the picking problem can be
reformulated as a segmentation problem. The reason is that the arrival
time points are considered seismic phase edges in a one-dimensional
space and, therefore, the picking problem shares numerous features
with the edge detection problem.
This idea is the inspiration for Zhu and Beroza (2019) to develop a
PhaseNet model based on the U-Net architecture. Following substantial
experiments, it has been demonstrated that seismic waveform data are
compressed to the deepest level by U-Net, and a separation of P-wave,
S-wave and noise features is achieved in the condensed neural network,
which allows PhaseNet to achieve accurate and objective picking of the
arriving P-wave and S-wave. The advantage is superior to human ex­
perts. Furthermore, PhaseNet can perform accurate picking in scenarios
with strong low-frequency background noise. Limited by the epicentre
distance in the seismic training dataset being less than 200 km, PhaseNet
can only be applied to accurately pick the arrival times of local earth­
quakes with short epicenter distances.
To improve the applicability of CNN-based models for long-distance
seismic data, Wang et al. (2019a) designed an elegant end-to-end
CNN-based model (PickNet), which was employed to acquire the first
P-wave arrival times and S-wave arrival times of earthquakes with
epicenter distances up to 1000 km. The model is modified from the
VGG-16 model, inspired by the design of the rich side output residual
network, with the addition of informative multi-scale and multi-level
side outputs. Accordingly, PickNet can learn the various waveform in­
formation contained in the seismogram layer-by-layer, e.g., the impulse
peak indicating the picking time, and can refine the detection results in a
multi-layered manner. It has been demonstrated experimentally, that
this multiscale combination strategy of convolutional layers allows
PickNet to achieve satisfactory picking accuracy on long-range seismo­
grams. Noise is a possible adverse influence on the model: PickNet
performance degrades when the signal-to-noise ratio is less than 2.
Considering that seismic signals and noise are fundamentally
different in spectral content, one solution to avoid noise interference is
to separate between noise and interesting signals in the time-frequency
domain (Vaezi and van der Baan, 2015). Buildding on this idea, Dokht
et al. (2019) incorporated the Fourier transform into a detection
framework that contains a four-layer basic CNN model, exploiting the
spectral contents of phase arrivals for efficient separation of signals. The
automatic seismic detection process in this framework is divided into
two stages. This process may increase the amount of work. More deep
learning models that can automatically separate noise are desirable.
Recently, the continuously advancing fields of semantic segmenta­
tion and pose estimation have introduced more training strategies and
deep neural networks, which provide more interesting opportunities in
the direction of considering the seismic picking problem as a segmen­
tation problem. For example, Chen et al. (2018) proposed an interesting
DeepLab v3+ architecture where spatial pyramidal pooling captures
abundant contextual information, and encoder-decoder structures can
obtain sharp borders, thereby increasing segmentation accuracy.
Inspired by the DeepLab v3+ architecture, Pardo et al. (2019) developed
a novel deep learning model (Cospy), which utilizes two DeepLabs as
sub-networks by first creating a coarse segmentation mask for locating
peaks, and then culling. Finally, the results of the sub-networks are
combined using Hough voting, which ensures the acquisition of
long-distance information despite the noise entailed. Cospy incorporates
extensive improvements in both the deep learning model and the
training methods, which allow it to attain the respective advantages of
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PhaseNet and PickNet: its performance is immune, not only to the dis­
tance from the epicentre, but also to noise. One challenge in training this
network is the large number of parameters involved, implying that it is
computationally complex.
Sophisticated architectures and adequate labeled datasets achieve
more accurate phase picking. However, appropriate datasets and
adequate computational resources are invariably rare, which pose a
major challenge in the current application of deep learning models for
seismic phase picking. That is, how to attenuate the dependence of deep
learning models on large labeled datasets and large amounts of
computational cost, whilst ensuring satisfactory accuracy?
In a processing framework called CNN-based Phase-Identification
Classifier (CPIC), Zhu et al. (2019a) demonstrated how a simple CNN for
fast phase picking in aftershocks could be trained by employing a small
training set. After training a multi-layer classic CNN model, they itera­
tively applied the model through overlapping windows of continuous
waveforms, to perform detection and picking tasks. It has been
demonstrated that CPIC guarantees highly accurate picking results,
whilst also guaranteeing high efficiency for processing and high appli­
cability for deployment. Furthermore, it is resistant to interference from
noise.
To reduce requirements for the amount of training data, another
solution is transfer learning. For example, Chai et al. (2020) directly
applied the PhaseNet model to retrain approximately 3,600
three-component seismograms. The retrained model has been experi­
mentally demonstrated to outperform the original PhaseNet model, and
even human experts, in scenes with high background noise levels.
On the other hand, data augmentation can expand the space of
sampled features by increasing the size and complexity of training
samples, which can solve the problem that the deep learning model is
heavily dependent on large, labeled datasets. The effectiveness of
various seismic data augmentation strategies on the performances of
deep learning models was discussed in detail by Zhu et al. (2020). They
compared the performance response for the corresponding PhaseNet
model after adopting data that are processed by various data augmen­
tation methods. The employed augmentation strategy is particularly
well suited to seismic data and includes random shift, superimposing
events, superposing noise, false-positive noise, channel dropout,
resampling, and synthetic data generation.
Experiments by Woollam et al. (2019) further demonstrate that with
data augmentation by, for example, adding varying degrees of Gaussian
noise, a relatively simple CNN architecture (consisting of three con­
volutional layers and three upsampling layers) is also capable of
achieving high performance on seismic phase picking tasks without a
large training dataset.
4.5.3. Earthquake detection and localization
Earthquake detection and localization are fundamental for most
quantitative seismological analyses, since the vast majority of seismo­
logical investigations depend on knowledge associated with seismic
sources or their generated elastic waves (Mosher and Audet, 2020).
4.5.3.1. The use of CNN-based models. Small and moderate earthquakes
occur more frequently than large events, and typically feature lower
signal-to-noise arrivals, which tend to be misinterpreted as false arrivals.
Therefore, it is complex to detect and locate small to moderate earth­
quakes by utilizing phase picking alone. Seismic detection and location,
especially for small and moderate earthquakes, typically suffer from
increased challenges.
For natural resource repositories, volcanoes, plate boundaries, and
other areas highly susceptible to small and moderate earthquakes, the
rapid provision of robust seismic detection and location can provide a
valuable early warning and thus mitigate seismic risk. Existing seismic
detection methods are sensitive to noise, and failure occurs under even
moderate levels of seismic noise. Furthermore, these methods also have
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large computational demands, resulting in difficulties in deploying into
early warning systems.
As a preliminary work, Perol et al. (2018) first developed an eight
convolutional layer classic CNN model (ConvNetQuake) for seismic
detection. After classifying earthquakes into six geographic clusters by
applying the K-means algorithm, ConvNetQuake is fed with a window of
three-channel waveform seismogram data. The model can accurately
label these inputs as seismic noise or events associated with these six
geographic clusters. By comparison, the model outperforms other
detection methods in regard to computational efficiency, and it is ideally
suitable for areas with high seismic activity rates and adequate instru­
mentation, for reliable and rapid earthquake warnings. In the training
stages, ConvNetQuake requires a large catalog of localized events, and
such large, labeled datasets are not easily accessible.
ConvNetQuake provides a paradigm for applying CNN to earthquake
detection, in which data are preprocessed by segmenting the input
waveform into a set of fixed-sized windows and are fed into the CNN to
classify each window into a label. Based on ConvNetQuake, Tous et al.
(2020) proposed a CNN model, namely, UPC-UCV. The training para­
digm of this model is similar to that of the original ConvNetQuake,
except for improvements in the data preprocessing strategy and model
structure, for example, the utilization of undersampled negative data, an
increase in the filter size (from 3 to 20) and a reduction in the con­
volutional layer (from 8 to 4), which resulted in better model perfor­
mance for P-wave detection. These models classify seismic signals and
noise in the time domain.
Both aforementioned models exploit the K-means algorithm to
geographically classify the seismic signals, thus allowing the clustering
results to serve as labels for the predictions of the CNN-based models.
However, the number of clustered results potentially affects the per­
formance of these CNN-based models. For example, the performance of
ConvNetQuake decreased with experiments involving a larger number
of clusters (Perol et al., 2018).
Another challenge in detecting and locating small and moderate
earthquakes, is that the high-frequency arrival waves of these seismic
events tend to occur within narrow intervals, which causes the signals
collected by the seismic network to overlap. When numerous arrivals are
received, it is a struggle to distinguish which arrivals are generated from
the identical source.
To address this problem, McBrearty et al. (2019) fed pairs of seismic
waveform arrivals between two stations into a four-layer classic CNN,
thus predicting whether both waveforms source from identical or
different sources. The crucial idea is to leverage the advantage of
CNN-based models that can directly map the input data to an arbitrary
output target by exploiting convolutional operations. For this work,
whether two waveforms are from the same or different sources is
considered as the binary classification target, which achieved accurate
classification results.
The aforementioned studies revealed that a reasonably targeted
output increases the opportunities for deep learning models in earth­
quake investigation. Is it then possible to establish a reasonable pre­
diction target, which enables CNN-based models to achieve rapid and
accurate localization for seismic events? As an interesting preliminary
work, Kriegerowski et al. (2019) exploited a three-layer classic CNN
model for regression analysis for full-waveform multichannel seismic
records, successfully achieving accurate detection of the Cartesian co­
ordinates (east, north, and depth) of seismic events.
Numerous experiments have demonstrated that CNN-based deep
learning models are excellent at learning the morphological patterns of
most waveforms in seismic data. However, high-dimensional sparse
seismic reflection signals are more complex, considering wave propa­
gation, frequency, amplitude and polarity orientation. In this context,
when employing simulated reflection signals for detection tasks, it is a
challenge to design a high-performance CNN-based model, which
should achieve high accuracy classification and low computational
costs.
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Instead of a common practice, which draws inspiration from elabo­
rate CNN-based models in other fields, Geng and Wang (2020) exploited
a data-driven neural architecture search strategy to obtain a highly
resource-efficient CNN architecture for seismic data detection. By per­
forming hundreds of thousands of random searches in a constrained
structure space, they obtained a compact CNN structure (Seismi­
cPatchNet), a model that can accurately classify multiple seismic
reflection datasets simultaneously at a considerably low computational
cost. Despite the substantial time and resources required for training, the
availability of transfer learning will allow this highly lightweight and
computationally efficient model to provide more practical value.
4.5.3.2. Use of other deep learning models. Although the CNN-based
model performs well, it is not the only available deep learning model
for earthquake detection and location. For example, as a general-
purpose approximation, the MLP model with considerably simpler ar­
chitecture is also available for seismic data and achieves satisfactory
performance.
In an integrated approach combining a time-delay projection map­
ping method with an MLP model, Mosher and Audet (2020) demon­
strated that even a basic MLP model can achieve satisfactory
performance in seismic detection and localization tasks, after applying a
favorable mapping approach for processing features of seismic data. In
this integrated approach, the time-delayed projection mapping captures
the coherence information of the seismic wavefield and then provides
input features for the MLP model; the MLP model predicts the time
period in the dataset that encompasses the seismic event. Without the
requirement of specifying detection threshold parameters, the method
performs well in identifying the locations and origin times of earth­
quakes on a large dataset.
On the flip side, RNN models, which specialize in handling sequen­
tial data, are applicable to capturing the time-domain features of seismic
signals. In a task to identify seismic events and quarry blasts, Linville
et al. (2019) employed a basic CNN model and a basic LSTM model to
learn meaningful information from spectrograms, respectively. The re­
sults demonstrate, for time-dependent signal modeling, that the LSTM
model is a more attractive alternative, with the ability to capture the
time dependence.
Furthermore, one of the advantages of RNN-based models is that the
models can be deployed for real-time seismic detection, a task that is
extremely difficult for most CNN-based models that utilize the full
seismic waveform as input. Considering this advantage, Chin et al.
(2020) developed two LSTM models for rapid and accurate real-time
seismic detection, which were deployed in a real-time earthquake
early warning system. The objective of the LSTM-based seismic warning
system is to obtain the occurrence of seismic events and the duration of
P-wave and S-wave.
Considering that CNNs are able to capture the local correlations of
spatial information in images, hybrid deep learning models combining
CNNs and RNNs are promising in capturing contextual (e.g., temporal,
spatial, and logical) features from multidimensional data. Following this
idea, Zhou et al. (2019) considered seismic signals as a combination of
nonsequential and sequential signals and achieved event detection and
phase picking by leveraging a hybrid approach combining a CNN-based
model and an RNN-based model. First, an eight-layer vanilla CNN is
used to detect seismic events from a three-component seismogram. This
classified event seismogram is then fed to a two-layer bidirectional RNN
that labels events as phase arrivals and noise, similar to handling the
sequential labeling problem. Although the advantages of both models
are maximized, in this hybrid approach, the two models are trained in
two separate steps.
A more efficient solution is to develop hybrid models in an end-to-
end manner. During the training of an end-to-end hybrid model, all
components (i.e., various deep neural networks) in the model can be
trained simultaneously instead of sequentially (Graves et al., 2016).
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With the end-to-end solution, information loss in traditional multi-stage
earthquake detection paradigms can be reduced and the information
contained in seismic data can be maximized to further improve seismic
detection performance (Zhu et al., 2021). In an earthquake detector
termed CNN-RNN Earthquake Detector (CRED), Mousavi et al. (2019c)
demonstrated the robustness of the hybrid deep learning model in
detecting seismic events based on the spectral structure of the seismic
signal, for example, the ability to detect small and weak events rapidly
and accurately with multiple waveform shapes and low sensitivity to
background noise levels. CRED ingeniously combines RNN-based
models with CNN-based models in the form of residuals, which auto­
matically extract sparse features from seismograms by exploiting con­
volutional layers, and then leverage LSTM to learn the time-frequency
features of seismic signals, while the residual connections allow the
model to capture higher-level features in deeper layers and reduce
computational complexity. This elegant and flexible architecture does
not involve significant number of parameters, which indicates that it is
lightweight and flexible, and is therefore expected to be deployed in
real-time early warning systems.
A more promising aspect of these end-to-end models is that they also
enable the simultaneous performance of multiple tasks by developing
specific deep neural networks for each task. For real-world applications,
a deep learning model that is capable of simultaneously performing
multiple tasks is considerably preferable to an independent set of deep
learning models for a particular task. This multi-task-able end-to-end
model allows for efficient inference on the one hand, and the sharing of
informative and important features across related tasks on the other.
Recent work by Mousavi et al. (2020) presented the preliminary
results of simultaneous seismic detection and phase picking by devel­
oping an end-to-end hybrid model (EQTransformer). The model ach­
ieves not only high accuracy in phase picking comparable to manual
picking, but also high efficiency and sensitivity in detecting seismic
events. EQTransformer consists of a deep encoder and three indepen­
dent decoders, which cover the basic models (e.g., 1D convolution,
bidirectional and unidirectional LSTM). The encoder converts the
seismic signal in the time domain into higher-level representations and
contextual information. According to this information, the decoder
classifies it into three probability sequences, which involve the presence
of the earthquake signal, the P-wave, and the S-wave at each time point.
For simultaneously conducting phase picking and earthquake detection,
two attention modules are incorporated: one for selecting phases in the
seismic signal at the local level and the other for detecting earthquakes
by adopting a more global view of the full waveform.
To capture the full potential of available information contained in
the data from multiple seismic stations, Zhu et al. (2021) developed an
end-to-end hybrid model called EQNet with a joint training approach.
The model consists of three components, which are mainly composed of
a series of 1D CNNs, corresponding to the three tasks of feature
extraction, phase picking, and event detection, respectively. During the
training process, the parameters of these three components are opti­
mized jointly, avoiding the independent hyperparameter tuning of each
stage in multi-stage earthquake detection workflows. This jointly opti­
mized training strategy allows the hybrid model to effectively retain
important information from seismograms collected at multiple stations,
resulting in satisfactory performance in several tasks.
The end-to-end manner is highly flexible and presents an upcoming
and interesting perspective: these aforementioned hybrid models can be
applied to more tasks associated with seismic data analysis, achieving
generalization across multiple tasks by learning more combinations of
features in seismic data.
Furthermore, there have been a few explorations in unsupervised
learning for seismic detection. Compared with supervised deep learning
models that favor the detection of already known signals, unsupervised
deep learning models are more applicable to unlabeled seismic signals,
and thus search for new classes of seismic signals.
For example, Seydoux et al. (2020) developed a novel unsupervised
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deep learning framework for detecting and clustering seismic signals in
continuous seismic data. The framework combines a deep scattering
network (an interpretable CNN model) with a Gaussian mixture model,
where the deep scattering network is employed for feature extraction of
seismic data and the Gaussian mixture model is employed for clustering
the data in the latent space. The framework can effectively perform
cluster analysis and distinguish complicated seismic signals of various
characteristics, durations, amplitudes, and frequency contents.
Another application of unsupervised learning is to alleviate the
dependence of deep learning models on high-quality labeled training
data. For this purpose, Wang et al. (2019c) performed a series of ex­
periments by exploiting CGAN, aiming to solve two challenges: (1) to
reliably generate synthetic data by adopting labeled data that are
limited, and (2) to employ these synthetic datasets to further hone the
detection models. In the developed CGAN model, the generator employs
three pipelines for handling three-component waveforms, each with the
identical structure of a four-layer basic CNN model. Different from a
classic GAN, CGAN requires the input of additional seismic/non-seismic
labels information, thus overcoming the limitations of random samples
generated with Gaussian noise. The results demonstrate that the syn­
thesized high-quality waveforms (both seismic and non-seismic)
augment the available training data and, hence, increase the accuracy
of the earthquake event detection task.
4.5.4. Earthquake characterization
Earthquake characterization, which includes the estimation of the
epicenter location, source depth, and magnitude, can facilitate timely
emergency response and information dissemination in earthquake early
warning systems. Advances in deep learning render the rapid estimation
of earthquake characterization possible without manual analysis. A
challenge in applying deep learning models for earthquake role shaping
is how to achieve rapid automated earthquake characterization by
applying short, single-station waveforms.
As a preliminary exploration to solve this problem, inspired by
ConvNetQuake (Perol et al., 2018), Lomax et al. (2019) developed a
novel modified model (ConvNetQuake_ingv), consisting of a 9-layer
basic CNN. Distinctively, the final layer is classified by employing a
fully connected layer of 127 neurons, where neurons represent different
seismic features, for example, azimuth and magnitude. The final con­
volutional layer has only 64 neurons. The design enables the last con­
volutional layer to be available as a bottleneck layer to extract
meaningful features as a compact representation of high-dimensional
data, improving the performance of the model. It was demonstrated
that the model can detect earthquake events over a wide range of dis­
tances and magnitudes and to obtain detailed information on the cor­
responding local distances, azimuths, depths, and magnitudes (see
Fig. 16d).
CNN-based models have demonstrated impressive performance in
earthquake characterization. However, the convolution operation is
sensitive to particular information of the input data, such as amplitude.
One solution is to replace the CNN-based models with RNN-based
models, such as LSTM and GRU, since the commonly used RNN vari­
ants are insensitive to these information due to the design of the gating
mechanism. To this end, Mousavi and Beroza (2020) developed a hybrid
deep learning model consisting of CNN and LSTM layers, where CNN
aims only at reducing the dimensionality and extracting features, and
LSTM aims at estimating earthquake magnitude based on amplitude
information of signals. A series of tests have demonstrated that the
model can estimate seismic magnitudes directly from the raw wave­
forms that are collected from single stations.
The above models do not consider the geographic locations of the
seismic stations while focusing on the analysis of single station wave­
forms. Indeed, when seismic networks are scarce, microearthquakes are
typically seldom recorded at multiple seismic stations. For such sce­
narios, it would be an interesting opportunity to link data from multiple
stations and perform earthquake characterizations.
Z. Ma and G. Mei
Considering the non-Euclidean properties of seismic networks, van
den Ende and Ampuero (2020) employed a GNN to aggregate data from
multiple seismic stations. In this work, the seismic network is repre­
sented as a graph, where each node represents a single station and has
both temporal and spatial attributes, including a waveform time series
and a geographic location. The graph has four inherent attributes,
including the latitude, longitude, depth, and magnitude of the source of
the earthquake. This model consists of several components. A CNN block
is designed to process the waveform for each node, the first MLP block is
designed to aggregate these processed features to obtain the corre­
sponding graph representation, and the second MLP block predicts four
graph attributes, i.e., the earthquake characterization. Although this
GNN-based approach has limitations in regard to the real-time response,
it can provide more inspiration for investigations on the rapid dissemi­
nation of earthquake information.
4.5.5. Focal mechanisms investigation
Crustal stress fields are fundamental to unraveling the generation of
earthquakes, estimating past and present tectonic activity and exploring
possible future earthquake generation. The measurement of stresses at
depth throughout extended areas is a challenge, and one solution is to
thoroughly investigate the focal mechanisms of earthquakes, especially
microearthquakes located in areas of low seismicity. Typically, for the
determination of the focal mechanisms, in addition to arrival times, the
first-motion polarities of P-waves are indispensable information (Lentas,
2018; Stein et al., 2003), i.e., the initial upward or downward motion of
the vertical component.
With the increasingly large amount of seismic data, it is a challenge
to automately conduct more efficient and accurate measurements for
quantities (especially first motion polarities) related to the focal mech­
anism. It is apparent that deep learning models are an appropriate so­
lution. On the one hand, CNN-based models have robust pattern
recognition capabilities for seismic data; on the other hand, deep
learning models have excellent flexibility in allowing the mapping of
certainly given inputs to various expected outputs. For example, deep
learning models can achieve not only predictions of P-wave arrival
times, but also classifications of whether the first motion of a P-wave is
up or down.
Building on this idea, Ross et al. (2018) developed a deep learning
framework involving two structurally similar classical CNN models, to
achieve first motion polarity classification. The framework consists of
two steps. The first CNN model predicts the accurate arrival time of each
P-wave and applies it as a label. By using the labeled samples, the second
CNN model, which contains a softmax activation function as the output
layer, classifies the first motion polarity into one of three categories (up,
down, or unknown). The performance of this method is comparable or
even better than that of human experts.
As a preliminary work, the performance of the framework is com­
parable or even better than that of human experts. However, challenges
remain. Consider that the CNN model used for phase picking is only
responsible for regression and cannot present whether the phase existent
or not, which may further affect the classification performance of the
second CNN model. Furthermore, their training data come from more
than 2.5 million seismic waveform data painstakingly handpicked and
labeled over nearly two decades in southern California, which is difficult
for other researchers to obtain.
As an improved solution, to focus on the automatic determination of
P-wave first motion polarity, Hara et al. (2019) abandoned the predic­
tion of P-wave arrival times by utilizing CNNs, and substituted the
P-wave arrival results determined by human experts. They developed a
7-layer classic CNN model and demonstrated the high accuracy of the
model in determining P-wave first motion polarity, by using waveform
data observed in multiple regions. This work indicates that CNN models
can be released from region dependence, enabling higher availability.
Considering the subjectivity of human experts when performing phase
picking, certain human mistakes can still affect the performance of this
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CNN model.
Similarly, Uchide (2020) utilized a basic two-layer CNN model,
where the P-wave arrival times in the input were picked by human ex­
perts, to determine whether the first motion polarity was ‘up’ or ‘down’
(see Fig. 16e). To handle the small sample dataset, the work exploited a
dual-stage strategy to train the deep learning model. The first step is to
train the model using a large dataset of medium to large earthquakes.
The next step is to retrain the model using microseismic data. The results
demonstrate the effectiveness of this work in determining microseismic
focal mechanisms. However, this training strategy does not completely
solve the limitations of the model in small datasets since the model
performance is positively correlated with the number of stations in
different regions.
The above models are mainly concerned with exploiting the indi­
vidual trace information. To simultaneously consider the polarity of
regular arrays, Tian et al. (2020) developed a four-layer basic CNN
model (MTCNN) for simultaneously exploiting the polarity information
of neighboring receivers of a station array. The MTCNN is distinctive in
that the number of neurons in the final fully connected layer corre­
sponds to the number of neighboring receivers, with labels -1, 0, and 1
on each neuron indicating that the first motion of the waveform was
negative, unknown, and positive polarity, respectively. By comparing
this with a CNN model for single trace information (STCNN), the
MTCNN resulted in significantly less polarity prediction error.
Large datasets labeled by human experts provide robust discrimi­
nations of the first motion. It is desirable to explore additional solutions
in the manner of deep learning, thus escaping the dependence on labeled
data, manual feature engineering, and large training sets. A preliminary
exploration in this direction was completed by Mousavi et al. (2019b),
they developed an AE-based model consisting of eight one-dimensional
convolutional layers, to determine whether the first motion polarity is
an upward or downward motion. In this work, the encoder identifies the
polarity of a waveform by learning its simple patterns, after mapping the
time-series waveform to a reduced dimensional latent space. Experi­
ments on small datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of the
model. Furthermore, the model is insensitive to noise. Accordingly, the
model may contribute to obtaining better performance in determining
the first-motion polarity or other tasks, under challenging
signal-to-noise conditions.
4.6. Volcano activities detection
Volcanic unrest is known to trigger a variety of secondary hazards
that threaten local populations, economies, and infrastructure and even
affect global air traffic and climate change. Around the world, 800
million people live within 100 km of volcanoes (Loughlin et al., 2015).
For the reduction of severe devastation that is caused by volcanic
eruptions, the identification and tracking of volcanic activity are reliable
approaches that have proven effective (Auker et al., 2013; Mei et al.,
2013).
Additional details are presented in Table 8 (see the table in the
appendix).
4.6.1. Classification of volcanic seismic events
Due to the relatively low cost and availability of real-time data with a
high temporal resolution, monitoring systems are deployed at Holocene
volcanoes around the world for the monitoring of volcanic seismic
events, which generate an increasing number of signals in the form of
continuous data streams (Lapins et al., 2020; Soubestre et al., 2018).
The challenge in discriminating volcanic seismic events, is that a
large number of factors (e.g., soil characteristics and station site effects)
can have an impact on the monitored signal by altering the phase,
amplifying, or attenuating amplitude. These signals can typically be
utilized to monitor and identify volcanic activity. Therefore, it is
imperative that effective pattern recognition methods be employed to
analyze signals associated with volcanic activity.
Z. Ma and G. Mei
Spectrograms are a common type of data in seismology. Applications
in seismic analysis have demonstrated that deep learning models,
especially CNN-based models, show superior performance in pattern
recognition, can extract the features of signals in spectrograms, and
perform accurate classification. As an extension of a similar scenario, it
is promising to introduce deep learning models into the classification of
volcanic seismic events.
Building on this idea, Curilem et al. (2018) converted spectrograms
to 20 × 20 pixel RGB images as input and adopted a simple CNN model
with two convolutional layers to effectively classify various types of
seismic events, including volcano-tectonic events, long-period events,
tremor events, and tectonic events. The proposed CNN model captures
the differences between the two-dimensional local structures (band­
width and amplitude) that are formed from the time-frequency depen­
dence of each event type, and it can even identify spectrograms that
contain noise.
To explore the applicability of more deep learning models in the
classification of volcanic seismic events, Canário et al. (2020) compared
the performances of three popular deep learning models (CNN, LSTM,
and MLP) in the classification of seismic signals. Furthermore, as an
improvement, they designed a novel CNN model that consists of a series
of 1D convolutions and termed it SeismicNet. SeismicNet directly ex­
ploits the original signal as input without converting it to images.
Eliminating the requirement of an explicit signal preprocessing step
accelerates the classification of the four types of volcanic events. Indeed,
expeditious classification of the collected volcanic seismic signals is
essential in eruption crisis scenarios.
Similar to the dilemma experienced by deep learning models applied
to other geohazard-related tasks, large labeled datasets for model
training are also rare in volcanic seismic event classification tasks.
Similarly, the most promising solution is to introduce transfer learning.
To this end, Titos et al. (2020) attempted to extract high-level features of
the spectrogram by adopting a pre-trained classic CNN model (LeNet)
under a transfer learning-based strategy. This approach effectively re­
alizes the classification of seismic volcano signals and reduces the
computational cost that is required to develop a new model from
scratch.
4.6.2. Detection of volcanic deformation
Another promising opportunity for relieving the detection of volca­
nic activity from the unavailability of data is the detection of volcanic
deformation by remote sensing techniques. Satellite imagery data with
large coverage raise exciting prospects, especially for volcano activity
detection in remote areas where in situ monitoring is not available
(Loughlin et al., 2015). The most intriguing data come from InSAR,
which produces wrapped interferograms containing multiple fringes,
making it a desirable input for deep learning models that are employed
to detect volcanic deformation, especially for CNN-based models. A
fringe in a wrapped interferogram, which is a high-frequency feature, is
suitable for edge detection in the CNN model.
To explore the performance of CNN-based models in detecting vol­
canic surface deformation by using InSAR data, based on the transfer
learning strategy, Anantrasirichai et al. (2018) accurately classified
interferometric fringes in wrapped interferograms by applying a
pre-trained CNN model (AlexNet). As a solution to the highly imbal­
anced problem in the dataset, i.e., only four out of 900 volcanoes are
deformed, they used four data enhancement methods to generate more
positive patches, thus balancing the training dataset to avoid creating a
biased deep learning model.
A major challenge to the performance of CNN-based models in
detecting volcanic surface deformation by employing InSAR data is the
existence of atmospheric signals in interferograms. When atmospheric
signals appear as fringes in the wrapped interferogram, CNN-based
models tend to classify the signals as volcanic deformation, thus
resulting in false-positive identifications.
To improve the ability of CNN-based models to distinguish between
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atmospheric artifacts and deformation signals, Anantrasirichai et al.
(2019) further employed synthetic interferograms (e.g., deformation,
stratified atmosphere, and turbulent atmosphere) to augment deformed
samples. The results of fine-tuning the pretrained AlexNet model
revealed that, compared with the model trained by using real in­
terferograms alone, the performance of the model trained by using
synthetic interferograms was improved. This work demonstrates that
data augmentation can reduce false-positives caused by stratified at­
mospheric effects to some extent.
Another alternative solution is to improve the deep learning model,
enabling automatic denoising, and further eliminate stratified atmo­
spheric effects in InSAR products. Based on the U-Net model, Sun et al.
(2020) developed an end-to-end model for detecting volcanic surface
deformation directly from interferograms and undisturbed by atmo­
spheric noise. The model has improved the capability of localization and
extracting features, by substituting the combination of upsampling and
convolution in the original U-Net model with deconvolution. It was
demonstrated that the developed U-Net-like end-to-end model can
directly detect volcanic surface deformation by exploiting interfero­
grams and is immune to noise interference.
5. Challenges and opportunities
In the following sections, we will discuss the challenges and oppor­
tunities in the applications of deep learning models in geological hazard
analysis, where large amounts of data that are collected from multiple
heterogeneous sources are employed.
5.1. Challenges
5.1.1. The burden of training data collection
Deep learning approaches are driven by enormous amounts of data,
and their effectiveness depends on the availability of training data. In
other words, deficiencies in the quantity or quality of the training data
could strongly affect the performance of the model. However, in many
cases, satisfactory training data are inevitably in scarce supply.
Specifically, challenges in the quantity of training data are
commonly associated with the expense of data collection, where pro­
hibitive costs limit the coverage of monitoring devices that can collect
in-situ information, or prevent high-resolution remote sensing data from
being available. Challenges in training data quality are predominantly
associated with noise and missing values. For example, in seismic re­
cords, noise is present in the entire signal bandwidth; in high-resolution
remote sensing images, deficiencies in the spectral domain typically
cause salt-and-pepper noise. As mentioned in the above section, the
challenges associated with noise can typically be addressed by im­
provements in deep learning models.
Additionally, even high-dimensional, high-quality, large-scale data­
sets can be collected, and more challenges remain. First, for different
geohazard-related tasks, more appropriate data enable the application
of deep learning models to achieve more efficient and accurate perfor­
mance. The considerations required are, how to select more appropriate
data in a more automatic manner? Second, most classic deep learning
models need to handle a cumbersome data cleaning step. More auto­
matic and adaptive data cleaning by deep learning models is expected.
Finally, supervised deep learning models are currently still the simplest
and most applicable models for most tasks related to geohazard analysis,
which implies that labeling is still required for large-scale collected
datasets. It is a tremendously labor-intensive and time-consuming
process.
A convenient solution is to exploit publicly labeled datasets. Several
works have been initiated to provide the corresponding open-source
datasets, which could facilitate the development of deep learning
models for multiple geological hazard-related tasks. For example, in the
task of landslide prevention, Ji et al. (2020) contributed a large publicly
available landslide dataset, including landslide/non-landslide images,
Z. Ma and G. Mei
files with marked landslide boundaries, and relevant DEM data. The
dataset is available at http://study.rsgis.whu.edu.cn/pages/download/.
For the earthquake analysis task, Mousavi et al. (2019a) contributed a
large-scale, high-quality dataset recorded by seismic instruments around
the globe, including local earthquake waveforms and seismic noise
waveforms without earthquake signals. The dataset can be accessed
through https://github.com/smousavi05/STEAD. Indeed, these pub­
licly available datasets can also be utilized as benchmarks, thus estab­
lishing an equitable assessment environment, for the challenges posed
by comparing different deep learning models.
However, this kind of public dataset is extremely uncommon. While
calling for more similarly standard large, labeled datasets, more solu­
tions to increasing the diversity and volume of training data are desired.
Data augmentation is a reasonable alternative. Low-level data
augmentation techniques involve operating on the data itself, including
flipping, panning, rotating, and adding noise to images Zhang et al.
(2021). As mentioned in the above section, several works have been
conducted to explore the effectiveness of different data augmentations.
For example, for data augmentation of seismic signals, Curilem et al.
(2018) utilized methods involving amplitude deformation and fre­
quency deformation, adding random standard deviation as noise to the
signal, and horizontal shifts. Zhou et al. (2019) utilized methods
involving the addition of different levels of Gaussian noise. More
low-level data augmentation methods are pending comparison and
analysis.
Correspondingly, another potential solution is the use of high-level
data augmentation methods, i.e., data synthesis based on generative
models, especially GANs. This type of data augmentation method was
initially applied in earthquake analysis. Considering its advantageous
performance, more exploration is warranted. Furthermore, such data
augmentation methods are desirable in other geohazard related tasks.
For example, can GAN models be applied to achieve data augmentation,
to achieve the expected performance in the detection of hazard areas (e.
g., landslides), when satellite image data are missing due to cloud cover
or sparse ground stations?
On the other hand, transfer learning, a typical solution in deep
learning for limited labeled datasets, has been applied in deep learning
related to various geohazard analyses. Corresponding implementations
are predominantly in detection tasks involving the utilization of remote
sensing imagery, e.g., landslide and avalanche detection, where pre-
trained models are obtained by training mainly on ImageNet datasets
(Sinha et al., 2019a; Lu et al., 2020). These works have demonstrated the
applicability of transfer learning techniques, including pre-training and
fine-tuning, in addressing the absence of geohazard-related available
datasets.
The dependence of deep learning models on large labeled datasets
can also be alleviated by combining deep learning models with physics-
based models. For example, methods such as numerical simulations are
employed to learn the governing laws behind physical phenomena,
which then generates the training data required by deep learning
models. As attempted in the work by Yokoya et al. (2020), the dynamics
of debris flow erosion and deposition were considered, and simulations
based on the corresponding governing equations were computed,
culminating in insufficient training data for the proposed deep learning
model. Many more similar attempts are expected.
5.1.2. Representation and fusion of multi-source data
In deep learning, representing data into a format that a model can
handle has consistently been a challenge (Baltrusaitis et al., 2019). A
data representation refers to the vector or tensor representation for an
entity, which can be from an image, an audio sample, a time series
recording, etc. Appropriately crafted inputs that represent data in a
meaningful way to obtain more high-level features, are essential to the
performance of deep learning models for applications in geohazard
analysis.
For example, in landslide susceptibility assessments, converting the
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landslide inventory that was served as input into sub-images of the
corresponding dimensions required for different CNN structures, the
prediction results obtained are different. As demonstrated by Wang et al.
(2020a), they converted each one-dimensional factor vector into a
two-dimensional matrix input to the basic 2D CNN model through an
ingenious method, and the model captured more valuable features from
that data representation, resulting in the most accurate landslide
sensitivity maps. Similarly, seismograms from multiple stations are
considered image data, sequence data, and even graph-structured data
that integrate station information.
Furthermore, it is desirable to obtain good representations through
improvements in deep learning models, which in turn improve the
performance of the models. Several good representation properties
include smoothness, temporal and spatial consistency, sparsity, and
natural clustering, among others (Bengio et al., 2013). For example, in
earthquake analysis, the elaborate model construction developed by
Mousavi et al. (2019c), allows for a sparser representation from the
seismic signal.
Ideally, most scenarios would achieve more satisfactory performance
by utilizing data from a single source in one format. Indeed, most ap­
plications of deep learning models related to geohazard analysis involve
data that are heterogeneous from multiple sources. For example, in
landslide detection, a model may require information from optical im­
ages, DEM data, and various landslide inventory maps. The challenge
remains to fuse two or more relevant data involved in a certain geo­
hazard task to enhance the performance of the deep learning model.
Typically, there are three different levels for fusion: data (e.g., data
transformation to harmonize data sources), features (e.g., the fusion of
data representations by leveraging deep learning models), and decision
making (e.g., fusion when decision making). Considering that deep
learning models are inherently competent in data fusion, feature fusion
is an efficient alternative. In this regard, Baltrusaitis et al. (2019)
reviewed how to achieve multi-source data fusion, by developing deep
learning models that can learn multiple data representations. On the
other hand, Salcedo Sanz et al. (2020) reviewed fusion associated with
Earth observation data. These fusion methods from other domains could
be regarded as inspiration, and thus extended to applications in
geohazard-related analysis.
5.1.3. Interpreting the deep learning models
For deep learning models, the most critical challenge is interpret­
ability, meaning that it is difficult to explain how these outstandingly
performing models achieve these results. This lack of interpretability
undermines the applicability of deep learning models, even in situations
where it outperforms human experts (Reichstein et al., 2019). A
convenient and expedient solution is to adapt a number of common
techniques from the field of computer vision. For example, differenti­
ating the contributions of different components in a deep learning model
by exploiting ablation experiments, or explaining the functionality of
model components by visualization.
Several attempts have now been made to demonstrate the effec­
tiveness of these interpretative methods from the field of computer
vision, mostly by using visualization to explain the role of attention
mechanisms in deep learning models. For example, for landslide
detection, Ji et al. (2020) applied the Grad-CAM visualization method to
analyze the function of the different attention modules, revealing that
the heat map of the proposed attention module covered the actual
landslide area more accurately. For earthquake detection and phase
picking, Mousavi et al. (2020) also observed how deep learning models
focus on different parts of the waveform at different attention levels, by
visualizing the weights of attention modules.
However, merely interpreting how deep learning model results are
obtained is insufficient for the increase in the availability of geohazard
analysis. Fortunately, a large number of physics-based models based on
the physical theory of systems related to geohazards have been available
from the past. Theoretically, these physics-based models are directly
Z. Ma and G. Mei
interpretable. Therefore, the introduction of physics-based models into
deep learning models, enabling data-driven and theory-driven syn­
ergies, would be a particularly promising opportunity (Reichstein et al.,
2019). This combination of incorporating physical implications into
deep learning models is currently being applied in the field of natural
disasters.
As an example, regarding tsunamis caused by earthquakes, Cheng
et al. (2020) developed a CGAN model that provides a rapid and reliable
spatiotemporal prediction for nonlinear fluid flows, where both the
generator and discriminator employ a CNN model for spatiotemporal
feature extraction. The method simulates a tsunami with a numerical
computational model (Fluidity), where two series of waves with
different wave phases and wave heights are set as boundary conditions,
and their processed outputs are fed into the CGAN model. This method
facilitates the elucidation of the uncertainties that are associated with
hazards (e.g., tsunamis) due to variability in factors (e.g., waves).
Overall, the combination of physics-based models and deep learning
models can not only exploit the theoretical advantages of physical
modeling for interpretability but also exploit the advantages of deep
learning models for capturing high-level features of the data.
5.1.4. Reliability of deep learning models
Considering that most deep learning models applied to geohazard
analysis are expected to be deployed in disaster warning systems, reli­
ability is a prerequisite to ensure the applicability of these models in
real-world applications. A critical challenge is how to enable trusted
results from deep learning models, thereby increasing their reliability.
Enhancing interpretability is a preliminary solution, but it cannot solve
the underlying problem; improvements in the genericization and
repeatability of models are still required.
Improving the generalization of a model involves the question, is the
model predictive of unknown data? For example, a unique seismic
source or a landslide map or a seismogram from a region that has not
been utilized for training. Most of the aforementioned work has
demonstrated that both model improvements and data enhancements
can increase the generalization of deep learning models, and that the
high generalization of these models can be validated by using geohazard
related data from different regions (Zhu et al., 2020).
Another important concern that affects the reliability of deep
learning models is repeatability. However, deep learning models applied
to different geohazard-related tasks often struggle to replicate the results
of similar tasks, due to an absence of consistency in the experimental
environment and a standardized benchmark dataset. Several potential
solutions include (1) performing training by employing benchmark
datasets, (2) providing the open-source code and training models, (3)
adequately providing all hyperparameters used during training, and (4)
presenting the statistical significance from the results.
To further increase the reliability of deep learning models, a more
interesting perspective is synergy with physics-based models. For
example, cross-correction of results with a reliable physics-based model,
or the design of physical regularization constraints into the loss function
of the model (Willcox et al., 2021).
5.1.5. Scalability for deep learning models
An important challenge that extends the applicability of deep
learning applications for geological hazard analysis is the scalability of
the models, which refers to the capability of the model to efficiently
handle increasing workloads (Salcedo Sanz et al., 2020).
Typical deep learning models involve large amounts of data, for
example, in earthquake analysis, where common training datasets
include millions of samples. For geological hazard detection tasks, the
high spectral, spatial, and temporal dimensionalities of high-resolution
satellite imagery pose computational challenges for the application of
deep learning models in geological hazards. The massive training data
samples also multiply the complexity of deep learning models, which
subsequently require a larger computational burden and higher memory
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consumption, for example, high-performance computing (HPC)
resources.
Several solutions that are potentially available include exploring
more efficient deep learning models and dimensionality reduction or
fusion of data. Another promising solution is to improve the concurrency
of deep learning models. More powerful parallel and distributed
frameworks for deep learning models are desirable, to speed up the
training process and adapt these scalable models to the processing and
analysis of geohazard related data.
For example, partitioning a deep learning model across several GPU
devices reduces the memory consumption on each GPU with the extra
advantage of parallel speedup (Dean et al., 2012). For complex deep
learning models involving a large number of operational parameters,
tensor partitioning is an interesting solution that enables parallel
speedups in different dimensions (Gao et al., 2017).
Few studies are currently exploring scalable deep learning models for
geohazard related analysis, considering that the application of deep
learning models in the field is inherently in its infancy. More advances
are expected in the era of big data.
5.2. Opportunity
In the future, it is envisaged that there will be a dramatic prolifera­
tion of applications of deep learning models in geological hazard anal­
ysis. As available data continue to accumulate and hardware devices
become more powerful, deep learning methods are constantly being
evolved, and novel and interesting applications come along for the ride.
Two interesting and exciting opportunities are recommended herewith,
involving the following emerging concepts: knowledge graphs and
digital twin. The former allows the construction of knowledge bases
and inference engines for geological hazard-related analysis involving
deep learning, while the latter facilitates a broader environment for the
deployment of deep learning models.
On the one hand, knowledge graphs represent the integration of
human knowledge in a structured form, contributing to the learning and
inference capabilities of deep learning models, enabling the solutions of
complex tasks (Nickel et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2017; Ji et al., 2021).
Specifically, it is a simplified view that represents entities, concepts, and
the relationships between them in certain domains. The major advan­
tages of knowledge graphs are that knowledge graphs: (1) improve the
flexibility of deep learning models, where related knowledge can be
amended and restructured depending on applicative requirements, (2)
enable semantic inference and retrieval by learning knowledge embed­
ding representations, and (3) achieve knowledge sharing, thus ensuring
repeatability and scalability of knowledge. A detailed description of
knowledge graphs can be found in the work of Ji et al. (2021).
Recently, knowledge graphs have been extended to and are exten­
sively applied in geoscience. For example, multi-source spatio-temporal
data from Earth observations are integrated with maps, texts and other
knowledge from the geoscience literature, to construct a comprehensive
dynamic geoscience-related knowledge graph (Zhou et al., 2021).
Similar data sources and knowledge contexts will inspire significant
initiatives for the integration of knowledge graphs, deep learning, and
geological hazard analysis. For geohazard analysis, an interesting
knowledge graph could include (1) establishing relationships between
hazard-related factors or different hazards (entities), (2) understanding
geological hazard evolutionary features, and (3) reasoning and pre­
dicting by leveraging deep learning models.
On the other hand, a digital twin, especially a digital twin of Earth,
refers to an information system where a digital replication of the dy­
namic Earth system is achieved, and this replication remains under the
conditions of real-world observations and physical laws (Bauer et al.,
2021). More specifically, it is an evolving digital world, and by utilizing
massive real-time measurements available from real-world sensors,
digital twins can not only portray the historical and current state of the
Earth system, but also model and simulate hypothetical scenarios
Z. Ma and G. Mei
(various phenomena on Earth) without influencing the real physical
world (Saddik et al., 2021).
A digital twin is closely connected to the ever-advancing technolo­
gies of the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data (Jing et al., 2012; Mei
et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2018; Hong et al., 2017). As IoT systems
become ubiquitous, they can contribute in a timely manner to the gen­
eration of higher precision, high-resolution observations, thus enabling
the digital twin to continuously simulate more realistic Earth phenom­
ena in real-time. This exciting innovation raises considerable opportu­
nities for the synergistic combination of physics-based models and
data-driven deep learning in geological hazard analysis, thus solving a
large number of current challenges. Conceptually, a digital twin could
be envisaged where physics-based models and deep learning models
synergistically demonstrate the evolution of geological hazards and
enable the exploration of hazard chains through multiple scenario
simulations and, most importantly, achieve reliable and interpretable
predictions.
Indeed, to increase the applicability of current digital twin tech­
niques, an application to a small area would be sufficient. A number of
studies from other fields can serve as inspiration. For example, Barbie
et al. (2021) deployed a collaborative underwater network of ocean
observation systems based on a digital twin approach, which has the
potential to be applied to the early warning of tsunamis.
6. Conclusion
In this paper, we summarized the recent advances in the applications
of deep learning models to geological hazard analysis, along with the
future challenges and opportunities. First, we surveyed the six main
heterogeneous data sources that are available for the application of deep
learning models to geological hazard analysis. Second, we introduced
the background knowledge of deep learning and seven common models.
Third, we reviewed the applications of deep learning for hazard analysis
of six typical geological hazards (landslides, debris flows, rockfalls, av­
alanches, earthquakes, and volcanoes) and summarized common
application paradigms. Finally, we identified open challenges and dis­
cussed future directions.
The literature survey reveals that (1) deep learning has been applied
to the aforementioned geological hazards and is primarily utilized for
landslides and earthquakes; (2) deep learning can automatically learn
high-level features from various types of data and is less dependent on
domain knowledge; (3) the most common application is semantic seg­
mentation of image data by using CNN models to perform binary clas­
sification to determine whether a pixel point corresponds to a geological
hazard; and (4) due to the complexity of deep learning and the uncer­
tainty of geological hazards, the application of deep learning in
geological hazard analysis poses numerous challenges while generating
broader opportunities. We expect this survey to inspire researchers to
develop more creative and computationally practical deep learning
models for various geological hazard analysis.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.
Acknowledgments
This research was jointly supported by the Natural Science Foun­
dation of China (Grant No. 11602235), the Fundamental Research Funds
for China Central Universities (2652018091), and Major Program of
Science and Technology of Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps
(2020AA002). The authors would like to thank the editor and the re­
viewers for their comments.
28
Earth-Science Reviews 223 (2021) 103858
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at, https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2021.103858.
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