FloodVision: Urban Flood Depth Estimation Using Foundation Vision-Language Models and Domain Knowledge Graph

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Liu, Zhangding, Mohammadi, Neda, Taylor, John E.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Liu, Zhangding
Mohammadi, Neda
Taylor, John E.
author_facet Liu, Zhangding
Mohammadi, Neda
Taylor, John E.
contents Timely and accurate floodwater depth estimation is critical for road accessibility and emergency response. While recent computer vision methods have enabled flood detection, they suffer from both accuracy limitations and poor generalization due to dependence on fixed object detectors and task-specific training. To enable accurate depth estimation that can generalize across diverse flood scenarios, this paper presents FloodVision, a zero-shot framework that combines the semantic reasoning abilities of the foundation vision-language model GPT-4o with a structured domain knowledge graph. The knowledge graph encodes canonical real-world dimensions for common urban objects including vehicles, people, and infrastructure elements to ground the model's reasoning in physical reality. FloodVision dynamically identifies visible reference objects in RGB images, retrieves verified heights from the knowledge graph to mitigate hallucination, estimates submergence ratios, and applies statistical outlier filtering to compute final depth values. Evaluated on 110 crowdsourced images from MyCoast New York, FloodVision achieves a mean absolute error of 8.17 cm, reducing the GPT-4o baseline 10.28 cm by 20.5% and surpassing prior CNN-based methods. The system generalizes well across varying scenes and operates in near real-time, making it suitable for future integration into digital twin platforms and citizen-reporting apps for smart city flood resilience.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_04772
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FloodVision: Urban Flood Depth Estimation Using Foundation Vision-Language Models and Domain Knowledge Graph
Liu, Zhangding
Mohammadi, Neda
Taylor, John E.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Timely and accurate floodwater depth estimation is critical for road accessibility and emergency response. While recent computer vision methods have enabled flood detection, they suffer from both accuracy limitations and poor generalization due to dependence on fixed object detectors and task-specific training. To enable accurate depth estimation that can generalize across diverse flood scenarios, this paper presents FloodVision, a zero-shot framework that combines the semantic reasoning abilities of the foundation vision-language model GPT-4o with a structured domain knowledge graph. The knowledge graph encodes canonical real-world dimensions for common urban objects including vehicles, people, and infrastructure elements to ground the model's reasoning in physical reality. FloodVision dynamically identifies visible reference objects in RGB images, retrieves verified heights from the knowledge graph to mitigate hallucination, estimates submergence ratios, and applies statistical outlier filtering to compute final depth values. Evaluated on 110 crowdsourced images from MyCoast New York, FloodVision achieves a mean absolute error of 8.17 cm, reducing the GPT-4o baseline 10.28 cm by 20.5% and surpassing prior CNN-based methods. The system generalizes well across varying scenes and operates in near real-time, making it suitable for future integration into digital twin platforms and citizen-reporting apps for smart city flood resilience.
title FloodVision: Urban Flood Depth Estimation Using Foundation Vision-Language Models and Domain Knowledge Graph
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04772