Data Mining-Aided Automatic Landslide Detection Using Airborne Laser Scanning Data in Densely Forested Tropical Areas

Landslide is a natural hazard that threats lives and properties in many areas around the world. Landslides are difficult to recognize, particularly in rainforest regions. Thus, an accurate, detailed, and updated inventory map is required for landslide susceptibility, hazard, and risk analyses. The inconsistency in the results obtained using different features selection techniques in the literature has highlighted the importance of evaluating these techniques. Thus, in this study, six techniques of features selection were evaluated. Very-high-resolution LiDAR point clouds and orthophotos were acquired simultaneously in a rainforest area of Cameron Highlands, Malaysia by airborne laser scanning (LiDAR). A fuzzy-based segmentation parameter (FbSP optimizer) was used to optimize the segmentation parameters. Training samples were evaluated using a stratified random sampling method and set to 70% training samples. Two machine-learning algorithms, namely, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF), were used to evaluate the performance of each features selection algorithm. The overall accuracies of the SVM and RF models revealed that three of the six algorithms exhibited higher ranks in landslide detection. Results indicated that the classification accuracies of the RF classifier were higher than the SVM classifier using either all features or only the optimal features. The proposed techniques performed well in detecting the landslides in a rainforest area of Malaysia, and these techniques can be easily extended to similar regions.