Flood Detection Using Deep Learning Methods from Visual Images

Natural disasters cause devastation, chaos, destruction, death, displacement, and much more when they occur. With the advancement of recent technologies especially in artificial intelligence and deep learning, the severity and impact of natural disasters could be reduced by predicting their occurrence. In this research, the flood detection (using images) system is developed using the proposed architecture of the Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). In this paper, the main aim is to propose an automated System for precision disaster detection, in particular flood detection. The intelligent system will monitor vast problematic areas that are dubbed flood risk areas during the season. The intelligent automated system will systematically take images with real-time processing to detect floods. If a flood is detected, the system will automatically communicate to the ground station with the early warning to issue an early warning to all the inhabitants in the path of the flood. Since this paper will prove a concept, the other main contribution of this paper is a new dataset consisting of 9000 images collected from various sources on the Internet, labeled, and preprocessed. The Deep CNN architectures were trained and tested by constructing a new dataset of more than 9000 labeled images with flood and non-flood collected from different sources. Several experiments are performed with changing CNN architectural design parameters in order to get the best recognition rates. Experimental results show that 92.50% accuracy was achieved using GoogleNet. The second highest performance was achieved using AlexNet with an accuracy of 92.20%.