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
04/06/2026
Sony Electronics is introducing the SRG-AS10, a 4K 60p-compatible PTZ auto-frami...
04/06/2026
This recent grad from Spring, TX, led creative-video output for the Aggies' men's basketball team last season and has been producing video and creating ...
04/06/2026
For the first time at a women's golf major, every player in the field will r...
04/06/2026
Three Panasonic PT-RQ45 40,000-lumen 3-Chip DLP projectors made their first live...
04/06/2026
Bitmovin and Akamai have announced a collaboration with NRJ Group, a French mult...
04/06/2026
Telestream will exhibit at InfoComm 2026 (Booth N7952), demonstrating media work...
04/06/2026
Sony has announced the development of RIALTO 65, a 65mm format image sensor block for the VENICE 2 digital cinema camera, targeting release in the first half of...
04/06/2026
KOKUSAI DENKI Electric America will exhibit at InfoComm 2026 (Booth N8025, June ...
04/06/2026
Bell Media's TSN and RDS are the exclusive Canadian broadcasters of FIFA Wor...
04/06/2026
The Challenge: Receiving Heavy Media Files From Road Games Quickly and ReliablyT...
04/06/2026
MASV, a managed file transfer platform used in broadcast and live sports product...
04/06/2026
NESN has announced the appointment of Fahad Haider as Vice President of Operations and Engineering. Haider returns to NESN, where he previously served as Vice P...
04/06/2026
David J. Halberstam, who spent almost 50 years in sports as a broadcaster and an executive, died June 2 after a years-long battle with brain cancer.
Over his l...
04/06/2026
Although collegiate production programs are tasked with delivering high-quality ...
04/06/2026
California studio, two production trucks, global distribution system are combine...
04/06/2026
New global program empowers and supports storytellers through scriptwriting course and access to industry experts
TikTok and Sundance Institute today announce...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Bitmovin, a leading provider of video streaming infrastructure, and Akamai, the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business onli...
04/06/2026
American Underground (AU), the Startup Hub of the South and a community of mor...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
NVIDIA and Microsoft Reinvent Windows PCs for the Age of Personal AI
Brie Clayton June 3, 2026
0 Comments
RTX Spark - a 1-Petaflop Superchip, the Full...
04/06/2026
Inside the Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man Grade
Brie Clayton June 3, 2026
0 Comments
Simone Grattarola discusses shaping the look in DaVinci Resolve...
04/06/2026
Cine Gear Expo Announces 2026 Awards of Excellence Recipients
Brie Clayton June 3, 2026
0 Comments
Ed Lachman ASC, Caleb Deschanel ASC, and M. David M...
04/06/2026
St. Vincents Live with Orchestra Tour to Feature Berklee Alum Ruby Plume Berklee alumni St. Vincent and Ruby Plume will appear on the same bill across seven d...
04/06/2026
Back to All News
All the Truth in My Lies Coming to Netflix on August 28
Entertainment
04 June 2026
GlobalSpain
Link copied to clipboard
Download the imag...
04/06/2026
Back to All News
Larry Tanz, VP of Content, EMEA, Delivers a Keynote Speech at ...
04/06/2026
Back to All News
Turn Your Living Room into a Stadium With the New FIFA World ...
04/06/2026
Keeping conversations real on LinkedIn Published on Jun 4, 2026 Categories: Product News
LinkedIn Corporate Communications
Share
LinkedIn
Facebook ...
04/06/2026
June's forecast with GeForce NOW: 100% chance of gaming.
GeForce NOW is lining up new adventures for the month, from big-name blockbusters to quirky indies...
03/06/2026
SES and Viva, Mexico's ultra low-cost airline, have launched multi-orbit satellite inflight connectivity on Viva's Airbus aircraft. A total of 60 A320s ...
03/06/2026
The College Football Playoff, ESPN, and TNT Sports have announced kick times and...
03/06/2026
RED Digital Cinema will exhibit at Cine Gear Expo 2026 (Booth 33, June 5-6, Universal Studios Lot), hosting three panels and hands-on product demonstrations.
P...
03/06/2026
Roku has announced the Soccer Zone, a dedicated hub for FIFA World Cup 2026 content available across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Argent...
03/06/2026
Liverpool FC and Wasabi Technologies have announced a multi-year extension of their partnership, with Wasabi continuing as the club's official cloud storage...
03/06/2026
Grass Valley has announced that Australian News Channel (ANC), operator of Sky News Australia, has deployed Grass Valley AMPP as part of the relocation of its n...
03/06/2026
The Riedel Group has announced the appointment of Gudrun Scharler as CEO of Riedel Networks. She succeeds Michael Martens, who has led Riedel Networks since 201...
03/06/2026
Clear-Com has announced the deployment of its intercom solutions at Itaka Arena ...
03/06/2026
Scott Coker has announced six senior executive appointments for his new global MMA promotion, which launched earlier this year with $60 million in financing. Ad...
03/06/2026
Telemundo, the exclusive Spanish-language home of the FIFA World Cup 2026, has announced its digital and social media programming for the tournament, running Ju...
03/06/2026
The Bundesliga has announced the launch of Captain, an AI assistant built into t...
03/06/2026
Anthony James Partners (AJP) is serving as technology consultant for a moderniza...
03/06/2026
Audio-Technica has announced the recipients of its annual sales rep firm awards for the 2025-26 fiscal year. The awards were presented by Jim Schanz, Executive ...
Devastating floods are making headlines worldwide, but advances in deep learning for detection could turn uncertainty over evacuations into yesterday's news.
