Mapping Historical Landslide Activity Using a Swin Transformer-Based Transfer Learning Approach

Historical landslide inventory serves as a critical tool for analyzing landslide activity patterns and evaluating the long-term geological impacts of triggering events, including earthquakes, extreme weather events, and large-scale infrastructure projects. Although various methods-including visual interpretation, heuristic approaches, machine learning, and deep learning models-have been employed for landslide detection, efficient techniques for historical landslide mapping remain understudied. As a result, comprehensive historical landslide inventories continue to be scarce worldwide. In this study, we developed an advanced landslide detection model using a Swin Transformer architecture integrated with a Pyramid Segmentation Attention mechanism. Subsequently, we applied a network fine-tuning method to achieve cross-domain adaptation, enabling the reconstruction of a decadal-scale landslide inventory across the Wenchuan earthquake-affected region efficiently. Experimental results from the Wenchuan earthquake area demonstrate the proposed approach's superior temporal transfer mapping performance compared to state-of-the-art models. The proposed historical map also exhibits high accuracy and completeness, offering significant value for analyzing landslide spatiotemporal activity and long-term regional stability. Findings reveal that landslides stabilized overall between 2008 and 2021, with key influences including altitude, slope, and aspect. The results lay the groundwork for regional stability analysis and eco-environment recovery, enabling informed decisions in urban planning and infrastructure investments.