Extraction of Pluvial Flood Relevant Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) by Deep Learning from User Generated Texts and Photos

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Original languageEnglish
Article number39
JournalISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
Volume7
Issue number2
Early online date25 Jan 2018
Publication statusPublished - Feb 2018

Abstract

In recent years, pluvial floods caused by extreme rainfall events have occurred frequently. Especially in urban areas, they lead to serious damages and endanger the citizens' safety. Therefore, real-Time information about such events is desirable. With the increasing popularity of social media platforms, such as Twitter or Instagram, information provided by voluntary users becomes a valuable source for emergency response. Many applications have been built for disaster detection and flood mapping using crowdsourcing. Most of the applications so far have merely used keyword filtering or classical language processing methods to identify disaster relevant documents based on user generated texts. As the reliability of social media information is often under criticism, the precision of information retrieval plays a significant role for further analyses. Thus, in this paper, high quality eyewitnesses of rainfall and flooding events are retrieved from social media by applying deep learning approaches on user generated texts and photos. Subsequently, events are detected through spatiotemporal clustering and visualized together with these high quality eyewitnesses in a web map application. Analyses and case studies are conducted during flooding events in Paris, London and Berlin.

Keywords

    Convolutional neural network, Crowdsourcing, Flood mapping, Multimedia information retrieval, Social media, Transfer learning, Volunteered geographic information, Word embedding

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Sustainable Development Goals

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title = "Extraction of Pluvial Flood Relevant Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) by Deep Learning from User Generated Texts and Photos",
abstract = "In recent years, pluvial floods caused by extreme rainfall events have occurred frequently. Especially in urban areas, they lead to serious damages and endanger the citizens' safety. Therefore, real-Time information about such events is desirable. With the increasing popularity of social media platforms, such as Twitter or Instagram, information provided by voluntary users becomes a valuable source for emergency response. Many applications have been built for disaster detection and flood mapping using crowdsourcing. Most of the applications so far have merely used keyword filtering or classical language processing methods to identify disaster relevant documents based on user generated texts. As the reliability of social media information is often under criticism, the precision of information retrieval plays a significant role for further analyses. Thus, in this paper, high quality eyewitnesses of rainfall and flooding events are retrieved from social media by applying deep learning approaches on user generated texts and photos. Subsequently, events are detected through spatiotemporal clustering and visualized together with these high quality eyewitnesses in a web map application. Analyses and case studies are conducted during flooding events in Paris, London and Berlin.",
keywords = "Convolutional neural network, Crowdsourcing, Flood mapping, Multimedia information retrieval, Social media, Transfer learning, Volunteered geographic information, Word embedding",
author = "Yu Feng and Monika Sester",
note = "Funding information: Acknowledgments: The authors would like to acknowledge the support from BMBF funded research project “EVUS — Real-Time Prediction of Pluvial Floods and Induced Water Contamination in Urban Areas” (BMBF, 03G0846A). We also gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of a GeForce Titan X GPU used for this research. The publication of this article was funded by the Open Access Fund of the Leibniz Universit{\"a}t Hannover.",
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T1 - Extraction of Pluvial Flood Relevant Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) by Deep Learning from User Generated Texts and Photos

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AU - Sester, Monika

N1 - Funding information: Acknowledgments: The authors would like to acknowledge the support from BMBF funded research project “EVUS — Real-Time Prediction of Pluvial Floods and Induced Water Contamination in Urban Areas” (BMBF, 03G0846A). We also gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of a GeForce Titan X GPU used for this research. The publication of this article was funded by the Open Access Fund of the Leibniz Universität Hannover.

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N2 - In recent years, pluvial floods caused by extreme rainfall events have occurred frequently. Especially in urban areas, they lead to serious damages and endanger the citizens' safety. Therefore, real-Time information about such events is desirable. With the increasing popularity of social media platforms, such as Twitter or Instagram, information provided by voluntary users becomes a valuable source for emergency response. Many applications have been built for disaster detection and flood mapping using crowdsourcing. Most of the applications so far have merely used keyword filtering or classical language processing methods to identify disaster relevant documents based on user generated texts. As the reliability of social media information is often under criticism, the precision of information retrieval plays a significant role for further analyses. Thus, in this paper, high quality eyewitnesses of rainfall and flooding events are retrieved from social media by applying deep learning approaches on user generated texts and photos. Subsequently, events are detected through spatiotemporal clustering and visualized together with these high quality eyewitnesses in a web map application. Analyses and case studies are conducted during flooding events in Paris, London and Berlin.

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