Texas A&M University Construction Science Professor Amir Behzadan gives a presentation on BluePix om Feb. 9, 2023 at Port Arthur City Hall.Courtney Pedersen/The Enterprise
Heading into this hurricane season, Southeast Texans have a new tool to report flooding by simply posting photos of street flooding, which will then use stop sign height and location data to determine water depths.
The crowd-sourced flood risk mapping application, named BluPix, was developed by a team at Texas A&M University to help communities better document and understand the impact of floods in the area.
Texas A&M University Construction Science Professor Amir Behzadan gave a presentation on BluePix at Port Arthur City Hall this winter to get community members to utilize the technology.
During his presentation, Behzadan said when working on the app, the team surveyed residents in coastal areas and emergency managers, who are in charge of disaster response, to learn what information they’d like to know during a flood. The groups were in agreement — water depths and the extent of the flood.
Behzadan said BluePix was developed to do just that using artificial intelligence technology, similar to that which is used to run autonomous vehicles.
The application uses GPS location and traffic signs to determine how high water is in an area. Behzadan since the size of traffic signs is uniform among specific areas, the GPS location will allow the application to determine the size of the sign.
“When you take a photo with your phone, your phone records a GPS location of where you are, we use that location and go back to Google Street View and find the same a stop sign without the flood,” Behzadan said. “Then we have a pair (of photos) of the same sign and we run a computer model to detect the red octagonal shape of the sign.”
After the model finds out where the stop sign is, it looks for the pole that connects it to the ground and determines the length of the pole. Those data are used to determine how much water is in the area.
“What the computer model does, is it counts the number of pixels on the screen that correspond to the sign and it already knows that it is 30 inches because it’s a residential area,” Behzadan said.
The model will then determine how many pixels long the pole is and will use mathematical proportions to determine the height in inches.
Using this technique, Behzadan said it will allow users to know the height of flooding in areas without flood gauges.
But the app will only be at its most effective, when many community members use it, Behzadan said.
“If a flood happens right here in Port Arthur, God forbid, and only one person shares a stop sign photos, we won’t have that resolution to say, ‘Okay, here’s the upstream we had 10 inches of water, this is going to move to downstream’ because there is no way to verify that,” Behzadan said. “But if you have 100 people spread all over the place sharing this real time photos with us then we can also verify and calibrate our models.”
Behzadan said with 100 people across a city sharing photos, there would be the ability to anticipate what will happen next in terms of flooding and rainfall.
“There is some element of prediction as long as we have a large participation by community members and … also emergency managers who are in charge of disaster response,” Behzadan said.
Currently, BluPix is only available as a website at blupix.geos.tamu.edu. However, Behzadan said the mobile app is being beta tested internally in his lab and he expects the inaugural version to be out for pubic use sometime in early fall.