The Machine Intelligence for GeoAnalytics and Remote Sensing (MIGARS) conference was held on 27-29 January in Hyderabad, India at the Vasavi College of Engineering. MIGARS 2023 brought together for the first time two primary IEEE Societies: Geoscience & Remote Sensing and Computational Intelligence Society. The aim of MIGARS 2023 was to join researchers from both fields and engage the use of machine intelligence in geoscience, geo-analytics, and remote sensing.

Among more than 60 oral and poster presentations, Shagun Garg (scientist in Section 1.4 Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics) won the Outstanding Presentation Award for the paper “Improving SAR-based flood detection in arid regions using texture features”. This work is a result of the AI4flood project, a cooperation of the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), funded by the Helmholtz AI project call 2019. The project, led by Prof. Dr. Mahdi Motagh (GFZ) and Dr. Sandro Martinis (DLR), uses data obtained from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) for flood monitoring with the aim of developing automated systems capable of generating flood maps and enabling a rapid response in case of a natural disaster. In particular, the mentioned paper shows that by analysing the texture of SAR based satellite images, it is possible to identify pattern and features that are characteristics of flooded areas. This information can lead to improved flood detection in disaster response. The paper will be published in IEEE Xplore soon.

(Text: Helmholtz.AI)