Search for: All records

Due to the importance of object detection in video analysis and image annotation, it is widely utilized in a number of computer vision tasks such as face recognition, autonomous vehicles, activity recognition, tracking objects and identity verification. Object detection does not only involve classification and identification of objects within images, but also involves localizing and tracing the objects by creating bounding boxes around the objects and labelling them with their respective prediction scores. Here, we leverage and discuss how connected vision systems can be used to embed cameras, image processing, Edge Artificial Intelligence (AI), and data connectivity capabilities for flood label detection. We favored the engineering definition of label detection that a label is a sequence of discrete measurable observations obtained using a capturing device such as web cameras, smart phone, etc. We built a Big Data service of around 1000 images (image annotation service) including the image geolocation information from various flooding events in the Carolinas (USA) with a total of eight different object categories. Our developed platform has several smart AI tools and task configurations that can detect objects’ edges or contours which can be manually adjusted with a threshold setting so as to best segment the image. The tool has the ability to train the dataset and predict the labels for large scale datasets which can be used as an object detector to drastically reduce the amount of time spent per object particularly for real-time image-based flood forecasting. This research is funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF). 

Floods are among the most destructive natural hazard that affect millions of people across the world leading to severe loss of life and damage to property, critical infrastructure, and agriculture. Internet of Things (IoTs), machine learning (ML), and Big Data are exceptionally valuable tools for collecting the catastrophic readiness and countless actionable data. The aim of this presentation is to introduce Flood Analytics Information System (FAIS) as a data gathering and analytics system. FAIS application is smartly designed to integrate crowd intelligence, ML, and natural language processing of tweets to provide warning with the aim to improve flood situational awareness and risk assessment. FAIS has been Beta tested during major hurricane events in US where successive storms made extensive damage and disruption. The prototype successfully identifies a dynamic set of at-risk locations/communities using the USGS river gauge height readings and geotagged tweets intersected with watershed boundary. The list of prioritized locations can be updated, as the river monitoring system and condition change over time (typically every 15 minutes). The prototype also performs flood frequency analysis (FFA) using various probability distributions with the associated uncertainty estimation to assist engineers in designing safe structures. This presentation will discuss about the FAIS functionalities and real-time implementation of the prototype across south and southeast USA. This research is funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF).