Detection and Estimation of Inundation and Associated Risks Using Traffic and Monitoring Cameras and Image Processing Under Extreme Flooding Conditions

The main objective of this project is to develop an inundation detection and evaluation framework using images from traffic monitoring cameras and reliable flood monitoring under extreme precipitation conditions. This study presents a comparative assessment of image enhancement and segmentation techniques to automatically identify the flash flooding from the low-resolution images taken by traffic-monitoring cameras. Due to inaccurate equipment in severe weather conditions (e.g., raindrops or light refraction on camera lenses), low-resolution images are subject to noises that degrade the quality of information. De-noising procedures are carried out for the enhancement of images by removing different types of noises. After the de-noising, image segmentation is implemented to detect the inundation from the images automatically. In addition, the detection of the inundation using the image segmentation with and without de-noising techniques are compared. The results indicate that among de-noising methods, the Bayes shrink with the thresholding discrete wavelet transform shows the most reliable result. For the image segmentation, the Bayesian segmentation is superior to the others. The results demonstrate that the proposed image enhancement and segmentation methods can be effectively used to identify the inundation from low-resolution images taken in severe weather conditions. A new Bayesian filtering method will be devised and applied to estimate the inundation from low-resolution images that will allow traffic engineers to take preventive or proactive actions to improve the safety of drivers and protect and preserve the transportation infrastructure. This new observation with improved accuracy will enhance our understanding of dynamic urban flooding by filling an information gap in the locations where conventional observations have limitations.