Deep Sensing of Urban Waterlogging

Shi-Wei Lo,Meng-Wei Lin,Jo-Yu Chang,Chien-Hao Tseng,Fang-Pang Lin,Jyh-Horng Wu

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3111623

Shi-Wei Lo, Meng-Wei Lin + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2021.3111623

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Abstract

In the monsoon season, sudden flood events occur frequently in urban areas, which hamper the social and economic activities and may threaten the infrastructure and lives. The use of an efficient large-scale waterlogging sensing and information system can provide valuable near real-time disaster information to facilitate disaster management and enhance awareness of the general public to alleviate losses during and after flood disasters. Therefore, in this study, a visual sensing approach driven by deep neural networks and information and communication technology was developed to provide an end-to-end mechanism to realize waterlogging sensing and event-location mapping. The use of a deep sensing system in the monsoon season in Taiwan was demonstrated, and waterlogging events were predicted on the island-wide scale. The system could sense approximately 2379 vision sources through an internet of video things framework and transmit the event-location information in 5 min. The proposed approach can sense waterlogging events at a national scale and provide an efficient and highly scalable alternative to conventional waterlogging sensing methods.

Highlights

In recent years, increasingly severe weather phenomena have been observed worldwide
The occurrence of urban floods has become more frequent owing to short-term local heavy rainfall events
In order to give some context to the ‘‘ruler-free’’ water level sensing methods, we present a brief overview of our implementation, which is based on object detection and segmentation networks

Summary

Introduction

The occurrence of urban floods has become more frequent owing to short-term local heavy rainfall events. Such heavy rainfall events may lead to flooding and subsequently incur damages in populated urban areas, in which the highly developed plain areas are even more vulnerable [1]. The inundation situation is further exacerbated with sprawling compact blocks of buildings and the ever-growing of concrete grounds, in which such complexity of the urban terrain results in the reduction of the drainage efficiency [2]. The range of such flooding might be merely limited to a few blocks, the dense urban road network can still be disrupted, which may impede economic activities, further impacting on residents’ lives. Improving the flood control capability of the internal waters through hardware construction incurs prohibitive costs and such structures may

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