Enhanced river planform analysis using deep learning and medial axis transform with Sentinel 1A imagery Published in Earth Surface Processes and Landforms DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/esp.70158 Rivers Never Stand Still Rivers are among the most dynamic features on Earth. Every flood, every season, and every storm subtly reshapes their course. Over time, channels migrate, meanders evolve, banks erode, and floodplains transform. Understanding these changes is critical for flood management, ecological conservation, infrastructure planning, and predicting future landscape evolution. But there is a challenge. Mapping river centerlines and measuring river width over large regions traditionally require extensive manual effort, field measurements, or complex image processing workflows. What if artificial intelligence could do it automatically? That question inspired our latest research: "Enhanced River Planform Analysis Using Deep Learning and Medial Axis Transform with Sentinel-1A Image...
When I first started studying geomatics engineering, geoinformatics, geography, and environment, I didn’t imagine I would one day spend hours looking at rivers from space. My interest in rivers began much earlier, long before academic papers, coding notebooks, or satellite imagery, when I grew up surrounded by mountains, streams, and seasonal floods in Nepal. Rivers were never abstract to me. They shaped livelihoods, agriculture, and sometimes disasters. Over time, as I moved through formal education and eventually into research, I realized that rivers are not just physical features on a map; they are living systems constantly responding to climate, vegetation, and human decisions. That realization led me to ask a simple question: How do rivers change over time, and how can we measure those changes objectively? In my recent research, I used satellite imagery and GIS to track how river channels migrate over years and decades. Instead of relying on one-time field observations, satel...