Kuro Siwo: 12.1 billion $m^2$ under the water. A global multi-temporal satellite dataset for rapid flood mapping

Global floods, exacerbated by climate change, pose severe threats to human life, infrastructure, and the environment. This urgency is highlighted by recent catastrophic events in Pakistan and New Zealand, underlining the critical need for precise flood mapping for guiding restoration efforts, understanding vulnerabilities, and preparing for future events. While Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) offers day-and-night, all-weather imaging capabilities, harnessing it for deep learning is hindered by the absence of a large annotated dataset. To bridge this gap, we introduce Kuro Siwo, a meticulously curated multi-temporal dataset, spanning 32 flood events globally. Our dataset maps more than 63 billion m2 of land, with 12.1 billion of them being either a flooded area or a permanent water body. Kuro Siwo stands out for its unparalleled annotation quality to facilitate rapid flood mapping in a supervised setting. We also augment learning by including a large unlabeled set of SAR samples, aimed at self-supervised pretraining. We provide an extensive benchmark and strong baselines for a diverse set of flood events from Europe, America, Africa and Australia. Our benchmark demonstrates the quality of Kuro Siwo annotations, training models that can achieve $\approx$ 85% and $\approx$ 87% in F1-score for flooded areas and general water detection respectively. This work calls on the deep learning community to develop solution-driven algorithms for rapid flood mapping, with the potential to aid civil protection and humanitarian agencies amid climate change challenges. Our code and data will be made available at https://github.com/Orion-AI-Lab/KuroSiwo