Accuracy and efficiency of compact foundation models for surface-water mapping during floods

Overview & Synopsis

Pretrained Earth observation models may reduce the effort needed to map surface water, but their value depends on the alternative against which they are compared. We evaluated Prithvi-EO-2.0-Tiny using the 446 hand-labeled Sentinel-2 chips from 11 flood events in Sen1Floods11. A fine-tuned model, a frozen-encoder model, and an identical randomly initialized architecture were compared with a similarly sized U-Net, a larger Prithvi model, and spectral-index thresholds. Experiments varied the number of training chips, excluded events from model fitting, and measured computational cost and prediction reliability. With 252 training chips, U-Net achieved a water intersection-over-union (IoU) of 0.856 on the official test set, compared with 0.833 for fine-tuned Prithvi-Tiny. Pretraining improved the tiny transformer over random initialization by a reported 0.046 IoU with 25 training chips and 0.023 with 252 chips, but did not reverse the U-Net ranking. Across 11 event-exclusion evaluations, mean IoU was 0.768 for fine-tuned Prithvi-Tiny and 0.777 for U-Net; the paired interval included zero. Fine-tuned Prithvi-Tiny processed a 512x512-pixel chip in 16.1 ms on a GPU and 258 ms on a laptop CPU, compared with 30.6 and 665 ms for U-Net. Errors were concentrated near water boundaries, and high predictive entropy identified many, but not all, erroneous pixels. These results support a specific role for compact pretrained models: lower measured computational demand with competitive accuracy, rather than consistent superiority. Event-dependent performance, shared hyperparameter selection, and the distinction between observed water and newly inundated land delimit the conclusions.