Devastating floods are making headlines worldwide, but advances in deep learning for detection could turn uncertainty over evacuations into yesterday's news.
Applying a data set of 66,000 images, data scientists have created an ensemble of models for predicting flood zones. And the models are generalizable for application to new geographies.
The findings, published in a recent paper, will be discussed in a presentation at the NVIDIA GTC 2021 conference next month.
The pioneering effort landed second place at the Emerging Techniques in Computational Intelligence (ETCI) 2021 competition on flood detection. It came in just a hair behind, the first-place effort on what's known as the intersection over union score, or IOU, which measures overlap in image segmentation.
For Siddha Ganju, one of the paper's authors, floods aren't just something you read about or see in viral videos. When she was six years old, her father was driving in northern India, and his car was overturned in a flash flood. He escaped the car and was fortunate to make it to land alive, swimming past snakes, but he couldn't contact his family for nearly a day.
This was before mobile phones, and we were waiting for him for a long time, said Ganju, a senior data scientist at NVIDIA. Flooding isn't like a swimming pool, it's not something you can swim through. The current is very fast and filled with dangerous debris like fast-moving fallen trees.
India's monsoon season can hammer rainfall of 3 feet or more during a day, suddenly bursting rivers with a tsunami-like force of water. Earthquakes can prompt sudden flooding as well.
Floods cause more than $40 billion in damages worldwide a year, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Flood Segmentation in Seconds The ETCI competition asked contestants to use 66,000 SAR Sentinel-1 labeled images with pixels that show before and after a flood. Participants were challenged to develop semantic segmentation models using the data so that they could be applied to new unlabeled images to perform inference on potential flood zones.
Satellite imagery of Florence, North Carolina, depicting water coverage. The images - provided by NASA's Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team - included Bangladesh; Nebraska; North Alabama; Red River, North Dakota; Florence, North Carolina; and other regions.
Ganju teamed up for the ETCI competition with Sayak Paul, a machine learning engineer at e-commerce startup Carted. The results showed that their models, running on NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, can create a segmentation for flood zones spanning roughly 24,000 square miles in just 3 seconds.
Training Model Ensembles Ganju and Paul developed an ensemble of models with UNet and UNet++, a pair of convolutional neural network architectures used for image segmentation. They can analyze pixels for borders between things like land and water.
The duo's best performing model was trained in multiple iterations, with the output of each stage feeding into the next stage.
NVIDIA V100 GPUs in the cloud powered the training for the ensemble of models, and all the inference was done on them as well.
Developing for Social Impact Their generalizable method can be easily applied. Specific images of annotated coast lines, deserts, urban areas or others aren't needed, as it's all built into the model. This enables others to harness the work for any region, possibly just updating the data set to improve it with transfer learning.
Ganju and Paul hope their code, posted on GitHub, is picked up by local experts in science disciplines who can improve and deploy it for emergency systems around the world. They are in talks with the United Nations Satellite Centre, which is interested in testing the AI to improve its flood detection tool and disaster response system, said Ganju.
A lot of people could be directly or indirectly impacted by this, she said.
North America Stories
26/03/2026
Extron and Audio-Technica have announced that their Design Solutions devices, Ce...
26/03/2026
SPORTEL Asia took place March 24-25 at the Orchard Hotel Singapore, drawing 370 participants representing more than 220 companies from 35 countries. Approximate...
26/03/2026
LTN will demonstrate satellite-to-IP migration solutions for broadcasters, cable networks, MVPDs, and station groups at NAB Show 2026 (Booth W2100).
The C-Ban...
26/03/2026
The Seattle Mariners have partnered with Daktronics to install an upgraded outfi...
26/03/2026
The Esports Foundation (EF) has awarded National Team Partner status to organizations and individuals across more than 100 countries and territories for the Esp...
26/03/2026
Telestream has announced expanded integration between its Vantage workflow platf...
26/03/2026
FOR-A Corporation has announced a partnership with Nippon TV and NVIDIA to distr...
26/03/2026
CBS Sports and the WNBA have expanded their partnership through a new long-term, multiplatform rights agreement. CBS Sports will feature up to 20 regular-season...
26/03/2026
Zac Brown Band will star in the Sunday Night Baseball show open on NBC and Peacock, NBC Sports announced. The open was filmed at American Family Field, home of ...
26/03/2026
Major League Baseball opens the 2026 season with nationally televised games across multiple media partners. Fans can visit MLB.com/Watch for a complete schedule...
26/03/2026
DIRECTV has announced an agreement to carry nine new MLB-operated team channels, covering the Cincinnati Reds, Detroit Tigers (Detroit SportsNet), Kansas City R...
26/03/2026
Nationals.TV, the Washington Nationals' local broadcast channel, is now avai...
26/03/2026
Starting Thursday, March 26, MLB.TV will be available on the ESPN App, giving fans access to more than 2,000 out-of-market regular season games. Fans can also r...
26/03/2026
By Matt Klein
Hello to everyone reading this - whether you're a current YEP, HPA member, or just YEP-curious. I'm Matt Klein, one of the co-chairs of t...
26/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
26/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
26/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
26/03/2026
28 participating companies, from start-ups to blue-chips, lead the UK Group as part of the GREAT Britain and Northern Ireland presence across all the Halls at N...
26/03/2026
Arkona Unveils BLADE//planner and Major Usability Enhancements at NAB 2026
Brie Clayton March 26, 2026
0 Comments
New graphical configuration tool and...
26/03/2026
Bitfocus showcases complete control at NAB Show 2026
Brie Clayton March 26, 2026
0 Comments
Continuing development drives advances in security, availa...
26/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
26/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
26/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
26/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
26/03/2026
Nevion introduces powerful new Panel Builder to enhance VideoIPath broadcast con...
26/03/2026
2026 Oscar Nominated Films Powered by Blackmagic Design
Brie Clayton March 25, 2026
0 Comments
DaVinci Resolve Studio used on 27 of this year's no...
26/03/2026
Leader to present full suite of advanced Test & Measurement solutions at NAB Sho...
26/03/2026
Boston Conservatory to Present New England and Collegiate Premiere of Groundbrea...
26/03/2026
Back to All News
Have a Wish Worth Dying For? Netflix's First Korean YA Hor...
26/03/2026
Back to All News
The Truthers, Starring Jose Coronado and St phanie Magnin, Pre...
26/03/2026
Editor's note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on ...
26/03/2026
That gaming backlog won't clear itself - GeForce NOW is here to help. Stream the latest titles straight from the cloud across a variety of devices.
This we...
25/03/2026
Live match directors Sarah Cheadle (Sky Sports), Rob Levi (TNT Sports), and Andrew Swift (BBC Sport) sit down with the Premier League's Rachel Nightingale t...
25/03/2026
The senior from Upstate New York is manning the mic while also interning for the athletic department's sports-information team
In the live-sports-video ind...
25/03/2026
Synamedia has announced ContentArmor Edge Watermarking, a server-side solution t...
25/03/2026
SES has announced meoSphere, a medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellite network targeted for operation by 2030. The first phase will pair SES-developed software-defin...
25/03/2026
TVU Networks is working with Reuters on a phased migration from satellite to a c...
25/03/2026
Nielsen has announced three senior appointments. Seth Ladetsky has been named Head of Global Sports. Trevor Fellows will lead Nielsen's advertiser and agenc...
25/03/2026
Anoki and Amagi have launched In-Scene Ads powered by Anoki ContextIQ across Amagi's portfolio of in-content ad formats for Free Ad-supported Streaming TV (...
25/03/2026
Arkona Technologies will announce a series of enhancements to its BLADE//runner platform at NAB 2026 (Booth C.1808). The updates focus on usability and workflow...
25/03/2026
Daktronics has installed two tower displays and a video wall in the Lexus Club at Petco Park in San Diego ahead of the 2026 season.
Continuing to improve the ...
25/03/2026
MultiDyne Video & Fiber Optic Systems is celebrating its 50th anniversary as NAB Show 2026 approaches. The company was founded in 1976 by Vincent Jachetta, an N...
25/03/2026
IPC, a provider of integrated communication solutions, will make its NAB 2026 de...
25/03/2026
Live production categories were led by NBC, FOX, and ESPN's NFL coverage...
25/03/2026
The Atlanta Braves and Spectrum have announced a multiyear distribution agreemen...
25/03/2026
(L-R) Charlie Tyrell and Daniel Roher attend The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist Premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival at The Ray Theatre ...
25/03/2026
L3Harris Technologies and RFTEQ Pty Ltd signed a memorandum of understanding to ...
25/03/2026
L3Harris delivers combat-ready Torpedo Tube Launch and Recovery system, which deploys and retrieves Iver4 900 autonomous underwater vehicles through submarine t...
25/03/2026
The company expands leadership team under Chief Revenue Officer Amilcar Perez
S...
Devastating floods are making headlines worldwide, but advances in deep learning for detection could turn uncertainty over evacuations into yesterday's news.
