Multi-Modal Landslide Detection from Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 Optical Imagery Using Multi-Encoder Vision Transformers and Ensemble Learning

Abstract

Landslides represent a major geohazard with severe impacts on human life, infrastructure, and ecosystems, underscoring the need for accurate and timely detection approaches to support disaster risk reduction. This study proposes a modular, multi-model framework that fuses Sentinel-2 optical imagery with Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, for robust landslide detection. The methodology leverages multi-encoder vision transformers, where each data modality is processed through separate lightweight pretrained encoders, achieving strong performance in landslide detection. In addition, the integration of multiple models, particularly the combination of neural networks and gradient boosting models (LightGBM and XGBoost), demonstrates the power of ensemble learning to further enhance accuracy and robustness. Derived spectral indices, such as NDVI, are integrated alongside original bands to enhance sensitivity to vegetation and surface changes. The proposed methodology achieves a state-of-the-art F1 score of 0.919 on landslide detection, addressing a patch-based classification task rather than pixel-level segmentation and operating without pre-event Sentinel-2 data, highlighting its effectiveness in a non-classical change detection setting. It also demonstrated top performance in a machine learning competition, achieving a strong balance between precision and recall and highlighting the advantages of explicitly leveraging the complementary strengths of optical and radar data. The conducted experiments and research also emphasize scalability and operational applicability, enabling flexible configurations with optical-only, SAR-only, or combined inputs, and offering a transferable framework for broader natural hazard monitoring and environmental change applications. Full training and inference code can be found in https://github.com/IoannisNasios/sentinel-landslide-cls.