UAVs in disaster management: application of integrated aerial Imagery and convolutional neural network for flood detection

Floods have been a major cause of destruction, instigating fatalities and massive damageto the infrastructure and overall economy of the affected country. Flood-related devastation resultsin the loss of homes, buildings, and critical infrastructure, leaving no means of communicationor travel for the people stuck in such disasters. Thus, it is essential to develop systems that candetect floods in a region to provide timely aid and relief to stranded people, save their livelihoods,homes, and buildings, and protect key city infrastructure. Flood prediction and warning systemshave been implemented in developed countries, but the manufacturing cost of such systems istoo high for developing countries. Remote sensing, satellite imagery, global positioning system,and geographical information systems are currently used for flood detection to assess the flood-related damages. These techniques use neural networks, machine learning, or deep learning methods.However, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) coupled with convolution neural networks have not beenexplored in these contexts to instigate a swift disaster management response to minimize damage toinfrastructure. Accordingly, this paper uses UAV-based aerial imagery as a flood detection methodbased on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract flood-related features from the imagesof the disaster zone. This method is effective in assessing the damage to local infrastructures in thedisaster zones. The study area is based on a flood-prone region of the Indus River in Pakistan, whereboth pre-and post-disaster images are collected through UAVs. For the training phase,2150 imagepatches are created by resizing and cropping the source images. These patches in the training datasettrain the CNN model to detect and extract the regions where a flood-related change has occurred.The model is tested against both pre-and post-disaster images to validate it, which has positive flooddetection results with an accuracy of 91%. Disaster management organizations can use this modelto assess the damages to critical city infrastructure and other assets worldwide to instigate properdisaster responses and minimize the damages. This can help with the smart governance of the citieswhere all emergent disasters are addressed promptl