Automated Burned Scar Mapping Using Sentinel-2 Imagery

The Sentinel-2 satellites are providing an unparalleled wealth of high-resolution remotely sensed information with a short revisit cycle, which is ideal for mapping burned areas both accurately and timely. However, the high detail and volume of information provided actually encumbers the automation of the mapping process, at least for the level of automation required to map systematically wildfires on a national level. This paper proposes a fully automated methodology for mapping burn scars using Sentinel-2 data. Information extracted from a pair of Sentinel-2 images, one pre-fire and one post-fire, is jointly used to automatically label a set of training patterns via two empirical rules. An initial pixel-based classification is derived using this training set by means of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The latter is subsequently smoothed following a multiple spectral-spatial classification (MSSC) approach, which increases the mapping accuracy and thematic consistency of the final burned area delineation. The proposed methodology was tested on six recent wildfire events in Greece, selected to cover representative cases of the Greek ecosystems and to present challenges in burned area mapping. The lowest classification accuracy achieved was 92%, whereas Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) was greater or equal to 0.85.