U-Prithvi: Integrating a Foundation Model and U-Net for Enhanced Flood Inundation Mapping

In recent years, large pre-trained models, commonly referred to as foundation models, have become increasingly popular for various tasks leveraging transfer learning. This trend has expanded to remote sensing, where transformer-based foundation models such as Prithvi, msGFM, and SatSwinMAE have been utilized for a range of applications. While these transformer-based models, particularly the Prithvi model, exhibit strong generalization capabilities, they have limitations on capturing fine-grained details compared to convolutional neural network architectures like U-Net in segmentation tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, U-Prithvi, which combines the strengths of the Prithvi transformer with…