
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.
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/06/2025
Star Studded Ensemble Cast Are Joined by Richard Rankin as Filming Begins on the Second Season
[June 12, 2025 - Boston, MA]: The Forsytes, Debbie Horsfield...
30/06/2025
The Artemis II Space Launch System core stage is integrated with the solid rocket boosters inside High Bay 3 of the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASAs Kennedy S...
30/06/2025
RALEIGH, N.C. Capitol Broadcasting Co. has named Heather Gray vice president and general manager of WRAL-TV and WRAZ-TV here....
30/06/2025
The Virginia Association of Broadcasters has recognized Bill Sewell, Director of Engineering at WTKR & WGNT in Norfolk, Va. as the recipient of the 2025 J.J. Fr...
30/06/2025
The Society of Broadcast Engineers said its annual member drive resulted in the recruitment of 49 individual members....
30/06/2025
BURLINGTON, Mass. Avid today released its fully integrated news platform, uniting MediaCentral and Wolftech News in a single newsroom solution, and will demonst...
30/06/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communication's Enforcement and Media Bureaus have entered into a Consent Decree with Sinclair Broadcast Group to resolve a variety o...
30/06/2025
Eurorack sequencer module reimagined
California-based modular synth innovators Qu-Bit have announced the launch of a new module that offers a fresh new take...
30/06/2025
Berklee at Umbria Jazz Clinics to Host 40th Anniversary Concert The celebration will be held on July 10 in Perugia, Italy.
By
Colette Greenstein
June 30, 202...
30/06/2025
PremiumBeat Tips and Tricks
Brie Clayton June 30, 2025
0 Comments
When editing to impress, you'll need quality music, and if your studio happens t...
30/06/2025
Improved dynamic behaviour, improved audio quality & more
Techivation have announced the release of an upgraded edition of their very first premium plug-in,...
30/06/2025
Back to All News
Bel n Cuesta and Karra Elejalde Star in El ni o, the New Film ...
30/06/2025
Back to All News
A New Dangerous Troll Awakens: Netflix Unleashes Teaser for Troll 2Play Video
Play Video
Entertainment
30 June 2025
GlobalNorwayDenmarkSwe...
30/06/2025
The Focusrite Summer Sale is now on Don't miss unbeatable deals on Scarlett, Vocaster, and more.
Whether you're an artist, a producer, or a podcaste...
30/06/2025
All 8 episodes of Season 1 of 1923 will be available on RT Player from Tuesday ...
30/06/2025
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
52% report AI security spending is displacing tr...
30/06/2025
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Cannes, June 30th, 2025 - Thales Alenia Space, t...
29/06/2025
Handpan-inspired instrument announced
Roland have announced the launch of the Mood Pan, a unique electronic hand percussion instrument that has been designe...
29/06/2025
Back to All News
A Secret Society, Ritualistic Killings, and a Century-Old Curs...
28/06/2025
Johannesburg, 27 June 2025 - As the nation commemorates Youth Month
2025, the N...
28/06/2025
WASHINGTON In a press conference following the Federal Communications Commission's May Open Meeting, Chair Brendan Carr promised the agency would move rapid...
28/06/2025
STAMFORD, Conn. Charter Communications has awarded $1.1 million in Spectrum Digital Education grants to 55 nonprofit organizations that work to expand access to...
28/06/2025
LAKE FOREST, Calif. June 19, 2025
What's New:
Sonnet Technologies today announced the certification of its Echo 20 Thunderbolt 4 SuperDock as an Engin...
28/06/2025
MASV (massive.io), the fastest and most reliable large file transfer platform for media professionals, has been named an IDC Innovator in the IDC Innovators: Me...
28/06/2025
Grass Valley today announced that TV SKYLINE GmbH, one of Europe's top mobile production providers, has expanded its camera inventory with 30 LDX 135 UHD/HD...
28/06/2025
AgileTV, a European leader in TV and video technology solutions, signed an agreement with Austrian telco LIWEST to develop and implement its TV service in Austr...
28/06/2025
Music theory plug-in updated
Three months on from the release of the latest version of their renowned music theory plug in, Scaler Music have launched an up...
28/06/2025
The 48th Annual Indian National Finals Rodeo Shot with Blackmagic PYXIS 6K
Brie Clayton June 27, 2025
0 Comments
Filmmaker Cameron Mackey relied on Bl...
28/06/2025
Social, Streaming Don't Compete, They Compliment
Andy Marken June 27, 2025
0 Comments
I think we've all arrived at a very special place. Spir...
28/06/2025
Blackmagic Design Captures Filipino Rock Band Drama Singtala
Brie Clayton June 27, 2025
0 Comments
Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro 12K and DaVinci Resolve St...
28/06/2025
Enhance Videos Faster with Aiarty Video Enhancer - Offline, Sharp, and Natural
Brie Clayton June 27, 2025
0 Comments
If you've used AI video tools...
27/06/2025
By Jessica Herndon
One of the most exciting things about the Sundance Film Fest...
27/06/2025
K-Pop remains one of the biggest genres globally, and many fans just can't get enough of it. That's why Spotify has launched a new series of K-Pop perf...
27/06/2025
In our latest blog post, Rafael Rivera highlights the rising threat of online scams, and the important role cybersecurity plays in protecting families across ge...
27/06/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has set deadlines for comments to a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) to codify certain foreign ownership re...
27/06/2025
WASHINGTON In a press conference following the Federal Communications Commission's May Open Meeting, Chair Brendan Carr promised the agency would move rapid...
27/06/2025
From grounded realism to bending, impossible geometries
Klevgrand have announced the release of a new algorithmic reverb plug-in which they say deconstruct...
27/06/2025
Learn to use REW for room analysis
Acoustic treatment is one of the most important factors in any studio, and with the extensive range of products available...
27/06/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. The HDMI Forum has released Version 2.2. of the HDMI Specification with 96Gbps bandwidth and next-gen HDMI Fixed Rate Link technology to provid...
27/06/2025
MONTREAL Grass Valley has announced that TV Skyline GmbH, one of Europe's top mobile production providers, has expanded its camera inventory with the acquis...
27/06/2025
NEW YORK & CHICAGO FuboTV Inc. and Weigel Broadcasting Co. have announced a multi-year agreement for distribution of seven networks including MeTV, H&I, Movies!...
27/06/2025
NEW YORK A national survey of U.S. consumers shows 66% of us watch TV all or most of the time and also multitask while doing it....
27/06/2025
MIAMI Sunbeam Television has reached a multiyear agreement with Findal Media & Technology Group to broadcast the new ABC Miami beginning Aug. 4....
27/06/2025
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. AccuWeather has announced a deal with Perplexity, a AI-powered search and answer engine, that will bring AccuWeathers weather data and severe...
27/06/2025
WASHINGTON After being sworn in on June 23 as the Federal Communications Commission's newest Commissioner, Olivia Trusty has hit the ground running with the...
27/06/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commissions has set deadlines for comments to a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to codify certain foreign ownership r...
27/06/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP media probing, monitoring, visualization, and analytics, has announced a new collaboration with Gencom Techno...
27/06/2025
Pixel Power (A Rohde & Schwarz Company) has recently been working with France T l visions, the French national public TV broadcaster, on a number of projects fo...