Under global climate change, urban flooding occurs frequently, leading to huge economic losses and human casualties. Extreme rainfall is one of the direct and key causes of urban flooding, and accurate rainfall estimates at high spatiotemporal resolution are of great significance for real-time urban flood forecasting. Using existing rainfall intensity measurement technologies, including ground rainfall gauges, ground-based radar, and satellite remote sensing, it is challenging to obtain estimates of the desired quality and resolution. However, an approach based on processing distributed surveillance camera network imagery through machine learning algorithms to estimate rainfall intensities shows considerable promise. Here, we present a novel approach that first extracts raindrop information from the surveillance camera images (rather than using the raw imagery directly), followed by the use of convolutional neural networks to estimate rainfall intensity from the resulting raindrop information. Evaluation of the approach on 12 rainfall events under both daytime and nighttime conditions shows that generalization ability, and especially nighttime predictive performance, is significantly improved. This represents an important step toward achieving real-time, high spatiotemporal resolution, measurement of urban rainfall at relatively low cost.

Urban flooding is a major issue worldwide, causing huge economic losses and serious threats to public safety. One promising way to mitigate its impacts is to develop a real-time flood risk management system; however, building such a system is often challenging due to the lack of high spatiotemporal rainfall data. While some approaches (i.e., ground rainfall stations or radar and satellite techniques) are available to measure and/or predict rainfall intensity, it is difficult to obtain accurate rainfall data with a desirable spatiotemporal resolution using these methods. This paper proposes an image-based deep learning model to estimate urban rainfall intensity with high spatial and temporal resolution. More specifically, a convolutional neural network (CNN) model called the image-based rainfall CNN (irCNN) model is developed using rainfall images collected from existing dense sensors (i.e., smart phones or transportation cameras) and their corresponding measured rainfall intensity values. The trained irCNN model is subsequently employed to efficiently estimate rainfall intensity based on the sensors’ rainfall images. Synthetic rainfall data and real rainfall images are respectively utilized to explore the irCNN's accuracy in theoretically and practically simulating rainfall intensity. The results show that the irCNN model provides rainfall estimates with a mean absolute percentage error ranging between 13.5% and 21.9%, which exceeds the performance of other state-of-the-art modeling techniques in the literature. More importantly, the main feature of the proposed irCNN is its low cost in efficiently acquiring high spatiotemporal urban rainfall data. The irCNN model provides a promising alternative for estimating urban rainfall intensity, which can greatly facilitate the development of urban flood risk management in a real-time manner.