Kuro Siwo: A global multi-temporal SAR dataset for rapid flood mapping
May 26, 2026 · View on GitHub
Latest updates:
- [✔️] Update codebase for KuroSiwo v2 + updated mean/stds
- [✔️] Updated citation
- [✔️] Uploaded annotation polygons
- [ ] TODO: Expand README with more elaborate guidelines
- [ ] TODO: Upload Kuro-Siwo to HuggingFace

Table of Contents
Download Kuro Siwo
GRD Data
- The Kuro Siwo GRD Dataset can be downloaded either:
-
from the following link,
-
or by executing
scripts/download_kuro_siwo.sh. This script will download and prepare the Kuro Siwo GRDD dataset for deep learning.Usage
- Make sure to grant the necessary rights by executing
chmod +x scripts/download_kuro_siwo.sh - Execute
scripts/download_kuro_siwo.sh DESIRED_DATASET_ROOT_PATHe.g:./download_kuro_siwo.sh KuroRoot
- Make sure to grant the necessary rights by executing
-
SLC Data
-
The SLC Preprocessed products can be downloaded from the following link.
-
Similarly, the cropped SLC patches (224x224 pixels) can be acquired from the following link.
Polygons
If you are interested in the annotation polygons of Kuro Siwo, you can download them from this repository.
Data preprocessing
The preprocessing pipelines used to generate the GRD and SLC products can be found at configs/grd_preprocessing.xml and configs/slc_preprocessing.xml repsectively.
Kuro Siwo repo structure
- Kuro Siwo uses the black python formatter. To activate it install pre-commit, running
pip install pre-commitand executepre-commit install. - Training starts by running
python main.py. The configurations are defined in theconfigsdirectory e.g- model,
- training pipeline
- Segmentation,
- change detection
- hyperparameters
main.pysupports command line arguments that override the config files. e.gpython main.py --method=unet --backbone=resnet18 --dem=True --slope=False --batch_size=32
Pretrained models
The weights of the top performing models can be accessed using the following links:
Citation
If you use this work please cite:
@inproceedings{NEURIPS2024_43612b06,
author = {Bountos, Nikolaos Ioannis and Sdraka, Maria and Zavras, Angelos and Karavias, Andreas and Karasante, Ilektra and Herekakis, Themistocles and Thanasou, Angeliki and Michail, Dimitrios and Papoutsis, Ioannis},
booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
editor = {A. Globerson and L. Mackey and D. Belgrave and A. Fan and U. Paquet and J. Tomczak and C. Zhang},
pages = {38105--38121},
publisher = {Curran Associates, Inc.},
title = {Kuro Siwo: 33 billion m\^{}2 under the water. A global multi-temporal satellite dataset for rapid flood mapping},
url = {https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2024/file/43612b0662cb6a4986edf859fd6ebafe-Paper-Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track.pdf},
volume = {37},
year = {2024}
}
License
The Kuro Siwo dataset is released under the CC BY license.