A Novel Hybrid Swarm Optimized Multilayer Neural Network for Spatial Prediction of Flash Floods in Tropical Areas Using Sentinel-1 SAR Imagery and Geospatial Data.

Flash floods are widely recognized as one of the most devastating natural hazards in the world, therefore prediction of flash flood-prone areas is crucial for public safety and emergency management. This research proposes a new methodology for spatial prediction of flash floods based on Sentinel-1 SAR imagery and a new hybrid machine learning technique. The SAR imagery is used to detect flash flood inundation areas, whereas the new machine learning technique, which is a hybrid of the firefly algorithm (FA), Levenberg⁻Marquardt (LM) backpropagation, and an artificial neural network (named as FA-LM-ANN), was used to construct the prediction model.