A case study on the susceptibility assessment of debris flows disasters based on prototype network in Nujiang Prefecture, Yunnan Province

In response to the issues of inconsistent factor selection and limited training samples in debris flow factor-based evaluation methods, this study proposed a prototypical network-based approach for assessing the susceptibility of valley debris flow disasters. The method involves organizing the training data through meta-learning and calculating the prototype center for each valley type, serving as a representative of that category. Subsequently, the distance between the features of unknown samples and the prototype center of each class is computed to determine the probability of their classification. Based on the category probabilities, the debris flow susceptibility index of the valley is calculated to obtain the evaluation grade for debris flow susceptibility. The model was applied to evaluate the valleys in Nujiang Prefecture, and its results were compared with historical disaster data, yielding a classification accuracy rate of 67.39%. The evaluation levels provided by the model align well with the severity of debris flow disasters in historical events. Compared to traditional methods such as field surveys and factor evaluation, the method proposed in this paper allows for the rapid identification and evaluation of debris flow disaster areas using remote sensing imagery, presenting new insights for research on early warning and prediction of debris flow disasters.