2020 IEEE REGION 10 CONFERENCE (TENCON)
Osaka, Japan, November 16-19, 2020
Water Level Detection from CCTV Cameras
using a Deep Learning Approach
Punyanuch Borwarnginn∗ , Jason H. Haga† , Worapan Kusakunniran∗
∗ Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, Mahidol University, Nakhon Pathom, Thailand
† Digital Architecture Promotion Center, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan
Email: punyanuch.bor@mahidol.edu, jh.haga@aist.go.jp, worapan.kun@mahidol.edu
Abstract—Natural disasters are a global problem that causes
widespread losses and damage. A system to provide timely
information is required in order to help reduce losses. Flooding
is one of the major natural disasters that requires a monitoring
and detection system. The traditional flood detection systems
use remote sensors such as river water levels and rainfall to
provide information to both disaster management professionals
and the general public. There is an attempt to use visual
information such as CCTV cameras to detect extreme flooding
events; however, it requires human experts and consistent
attention to monitor any changes. In this paper, we introduce
an approach to the automatic river water level detection using
deep learning to determine the water level from surveillance
cameras. The model achieves 93% accuracy using a single
camera location and 83% accuracy using multiple camera
locations.
Index Terms—deep learning, water level detection, CCTV,
CNN
I. I NTRODUCTION
Over the past few years, many countries are experiencing
natural disasters such as extreme floods, tsunami, storms,
fires, and landslides. According to the Asia Disaster Re-
duction Center [1], Typhoon Hagibis hit Japan in October
2019. It caused over 90 deaths, 480 injured, and over 50,000
damaged houses. The impact of natural disasters on human
lives and property losses can potentially have widespread
effects on the global economy since natural disasters can
pass through multiple countries. A disaster detection and
monitoring system is one of the key technologies to help
minimize damages and losses from natural disasters.
Traditionally, many disaster management systems are
based on remote sensors specific for the type of natural
disaster. For example, flood monitors [2] usually use in-
formation from numerical data sensors such as river wa-
ter levels and rainfall levels. Ko et al. [3] discussed the
common disadvantages with these remote sensors, including
equipment costs and the reliability of sensors. The sensors
usually provide data limited to a single type, such as text-
based data or numerical data. To ensure accurate warnings, it
would require additional information or combining multiple
sources of information. However, data from different sources
cannot be straightforwardly combined into a given system. It
requires some analysis to find the relationship between these
data since remote sensors are typically deployed by different
organizations.
Over the past several decades, many studies applied
surveillance cameras in disaster management, in particular
water level detection for flood monitoring. Yu et al. [4]
978-1-7281-8455-5/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE
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proposed a method using temporal motion changes in water
levels. This approach is based on the difference in features
between the previous image frame and the current image
frame. The method uses a Gaussian filter and an averaging
filter to reduce the noise, then the water level is calculated
from the horizontal edge. Hiroi et al. [5] proposed using
similar techniques on finding water flow based on temporal
changes using RGB values.
In contrast, Lin et al. [6] proposed an automatic water
level detection by using a collinear equation and the Hough
transform technique to find a water line and location of water
gauges. Lastly, deep learning techniques were introduced in
[7]. The study compared the dictionary learning model with
a convolutional neural network (CNN) on the water level
detection model and demonstrated that CNN achieves a better
result. However, most of these studies used CCTV cameras
that were focused at the wall or the water gauges for visual
interpretation of a water line and used a combination of
different feature extraction techniques to detect water levels.
These approaches assume an ideal setting for the imaging.
Recently, there are attempts to gather information in
various types of sensors and making it available for the public
to support the monitoring of natural disasters. In Thailand, a
water crisis prevention center [8] attempts to create a portal
website for river and floold monitoring including over 125
websites from different organization and different sensors.
For example, there are 3 websites related to live streams from
CCTV cameras and 7 websites about river water levels. Also,
in Japan, a public portal website [9] provides information
from different sensors throughout the country related to
rivers such as river water levels, water qualities, rainfall
radars, and snowfall levels. In addition to numerical data,
it also provides live-stream images of CCTV cameras that
are installed along the river. However, these images are
mainly for visualizing the current status of the river. They
do not include any meaningful information, which leads to
difficulties in interpreting and extracting information. Users
viewing the images require their own experience to judge
whether the current images are in the regular or abnormal
stage. So, it would be beneficial to both disaster management
professionals and the public to make use of these data and
provide meaningful information by combining different data
sources in an automatic process.
As alluded to above, in the real-world, the cameras might
not be installed in the best position for capturing water levels,
i.e., CCTV cameras cannot clearly capture water gauges in
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the images. It is possible to have several sensors around
the same area, such as CCTV camera, and a water level
sensor, but some locations might be limited to just one.
In an emergency situation, a water sensor can malfunction,
resulting in no river water level measurement unless there
are other sensors nearby to compensate for this.
This research project aims to study the use of public
data from several sensors to demonstrate the application
of computer vision in disaster management, especially for
river height information. It is a challenging problem because
we can neither control the equipment settings nor ensure
that it is adequately maintained. This results in missing,
imbalanced, and noisy data. Although water level detection
can be intuitively viewed as a regression task, it requires an
extensive, continuous dataset to create a model. Therefore,
we propose to use a classification task to predict a river
water level from a given CCTV image to avoid insufficient
data and evaluate how visual information can be used to
classify river water levels. This paper proposes a method
based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) approach
with an attention mechanism to detect the water level from
an image.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
Section II describes the details of the proposed method.
The experiments are described and discussed in Section III.
Finally, the conclusion is drawn in Section IV.
II. P ROPOSED M ETHOD
The framework of the proposed method is illustrated in
Fig.1. The overall framework consists of two main processes,
which are data harmonization and water level detection
model. Data harmonization includes acquiring data from a
public source and creating a ground truth. The water level
detection model mainly focuses on network construction
(MultiConvAttnNet) and model training to produce a water
level detection model. Then we apply a test set to evaluate
the classification performance on trained models. Details of
each process are explained in the following sub-sections.
Fig. 1. The overview of the proposed framework.
A. Data Harmonization
1) Data Acquisition: Since our propose is to address the
challenges of using publicly available data, the dataset is
acquired from a Japanese website for river disaster prevention
information [9]. The dataset contains information from over
20,000 remote sensors across Japan, mainly in the Kanto
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Fig. 2. A sample image with the corresponding water levels.
region for a month from 22 November – 20 December 2016.
There are 6 types of sensors that provide numerical data such
as rainfall level, water levels, dam storage levels, snowfall
levels, tide levels, and water qualities. River images from
CCTV cameras are also provided. All sensors except CCTV
cameras were downloaded every 10 minutes. CCTV cameras
images were downloaded approximately every 2 minutes.
2) Data Preparation: In this study, we mainly focus on
water level sensors and CCTV cameras. The raw data are
mapped using the geolocation of the sensors. We built a
ground truth based on using a nearby water level sensor to the
CCTV camera. Fig. 2 shows the example of images with their
corresponding time mapping. Since the interval collection
time is different, we assume within 10 minutes that the water
level usually remains consistent and does not change rapidly.
We chose daytime images from 7 am to 7 pm to reduce
the number of low-quality images since images captured
outside of these times were usually too dark to clearly see
any features. The water level sensor data were used to define
class labels. Then each CCTV image is mapped into one of
these classes based on the timestamp. Finally, the dataset is
split into a training and testing sets.
B. Water level detection model
1) Model training: Recently, deep learning has become a
widespread technique in computer vision. In deep learning
[10], [11], convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown
promising results in image classification, image segmenta-
tion, and object recognition tasks. According to the ImageNet
large scale visual recognition challenge in 2015 [12], most of
the top 5 best models use CNN as part of their architecture.
However, CNN is known to be computational expensive
because it consists of several convolutional layers, pooling
layers, and fully connected layers. A transfer learning tech-
nique [13], [14] was introduced to reduce computational
time, where the key idea is to reuse pre-trained weights
from other datasets such as ImageNet. This allows users
the flexibility to train the whole model or some layers with
the new training set. Many CNN models InceptionV3 [15],
AlexNet [16], and VGGNet [17] have existing pre-trained
weights to use in the initial model training.
In this paper, we choose InceptionV3 as the base archi-
tecture because it has achieved a similar result with less
trainable parameters compared to other CNN models. The
base architecture is connected with a fully connected layer
Fig. 3. The overview of transfer learning using InceptionV3 architecture. The fully connected layers are replaced based on the output class. The initial
weight is from the existing dataset, such as ImageNet. Then we can retrain the whole or some part of the network with the new dataset.

(a) MultiConvAttnNet A

(b) MultiConvAttnNet B
Fig. 4. The overview of adding attention mechanism to the network in different locations (a) Attention layers is added after Inception Module C (b)
Attention layers are replaced Inception Module C.

Fig. 5. MultiConvAttnNet C, some of the convolutional layers in Inception module B are replaced with Attention layers.

to predict a water level as in Fig. 3. The total trainable
parameters in the model are over 21 million.
2) MultiConvAttnNet: In this work, CCTV images from
different locations are not positioned in the same view, but
they could have the same water levels. If the trained model
can predict a water level from multiple cameras, it can
be useful whenever nearby water sensors are broken. With
multiple cameras and imbalanced classes, training the model
can result in overfitting. There is an attempt to find alternative
solutions to prevent overfitting, reducing the number of
parameters and number of layers without losing classification
performance. In the past year, the attention mechanism in
Machine Translation [18] has been applied in Computer
Vision. In [19], [20], a self-attention mechanism is applied
as the extension or replacement of convolutional layers to
achieve a reduction in the number of model parameters.
Similar to convolution, the output from self-attention layers
is based on small neighbourhood pixels called a memory
block, then the single-head attention is computed in every
memory block based on the method described in [19].
Therefore, we add the attention mechanism to our base
model on the problem and evaluated its performance in
various settings. It is advised to start adding an attention
layer to the high-level features[19]; however, we evaluated
several different locations for attention and replaced some of
the convolutional layers with attention layers. An example
of connecting an attention layer is illustrated in Fig. 4. In
the subsequent Fig. 5, some of the inception module B
convolutional layers are replaced by attention layers. Lastly,
our trained models are implemented using a test set to
evaluate the prediction results.
III. E XPERIMENTS
Our experiments consisted of two scenarios: 1) a single
camera and 2) multiple cameras from different locations.
Each scenario is trained and evaluated using 5-fold cross-
validation.

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 (a) Accuracy and cross entropy
(b) Confusion matrix of the highest accuracy
Fig. 6. Results from a single camera model
TABLE I
ACCURACY RESULTS OF A SINGLE CAMERA
Trained layer Accuracy(%) Standard Deviation
Fully connected layer 13.48 1.06
Whole network 93.03 0.65
A. Single Camera
In this scenario, the dataset contains 6,382 images from
a single CCTV camera with 27 classes of water levels.
We retrained the base model from Fig. 3 using the Keras
library with the initial weights from ImageNet on 50 epochs,
50 images per batch, 299 x 299 pixels using the SGD
optimizer. Table I reports the results from 5-fold cross-
validation. The confusion matrix and training graph of the
best fold are shown in Fig. 6. It is clearly evident that the
model outperforms in terms of accuracy and stability when
the whole network is retrained with the single-camera data.
The result from training only the fully connected layer is
significantly low because the pre-trained weight from the
ImageNet dataset may not contain relevant features to our
CCTV images.
B. Multiple cameras
In this scenario, we combine two CCTV cameras from
different locations, but they have water levels of the same
magnitude. This was done to simulate a situation where
a single model could detect a water level from multiple
locations instead of training each camera separately. This
approach would be beneificial in cases where there are
missing data, for example, when water sensors are broken
and the CCTV cameras become a single source of informa-
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(a) Accuracy and cross entropy
(b) Confusion matrix of the highest accuracy
Fig. 7. Results from MultiConvAttnNet C model of muliple camera dataset.
tion. The combined dataset contains 6,652 images with 13
classes of water levels. Since our single-camera achieves over
93% accuracy, we applied the same architecture with this
dataset. However, this resulted in a 75.60% accuracy, which
is much lower than the single camera. We then increased the
dataset by using data augmentation techniques because both
cameras capture images in different positions and angles,
which may result in overfitting to a single camera during
training. This approach increased the accuracy to 82.80%.
All the training settings were the same as with the single-
camera except that the image size is reduced to 200 x 200
due to the available computational resources. Furthermore,
the Augmented dataset is trained with MultiConvAttnNet to
reduce the complexity of the network, as shown in Fig. 4.
Table II reports the results of each setting. MultiConvAttnNet
A achieves slightly better accuracy, but it increases the
number of parameters to 25.3 million because the attention
mechanism adds extra layers. Therefore, we also removed
some layers in the base model such as Inception Module C
as in MultiConvAttnNet B. It achieves a comparable result
and reduces over half of the parameters. Finally, MultiCon-
vAttnNet C is similar to MultiConvAttnNet B, but we replace
some convolutional layers inside Inception Module B with
the Attention layer, as in Fig. 5. The testing result is 81.7%
accuracy, with 7.82 million parameters. The performance is
similar to the previous setting, but it significantly reduces
the number of parameters. The confusion matrix and training
graph of MultiConvAttnNet C are shown in Fig. 7.
C. Comparison with the actual water level sensors
In each scenario, the developed model is evaluated with
test images to predict river water levels. Then, the results
 (a) Single Camera model

(b) Multiple Camera: Camera A

(c) Multiple Camera: Camera B

Fig. 8. Predicted Level vs Actual Level of test images by the timestamps .

are compared against their actual levels from a water level
sensor. Fig. 8 shows the comparison between predicted
results from each model against the ground-truth at the
same timestamps. It clearly shows that the majority of data
overlaps with its ground-truth. The single-camera model has
lower error rates, when compared with the multiple camera
model, as shown in Table III. This is because the model
is based on a single location yielding less variation among
training and testing images. Although the multiple camera
model does not clearly distinguish between 2 cameras, it
could be useful for reducing the number of model trainings
and a better performance for unseen cameras.

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C OMPARISON OF DIFFERENT RESULTS .
Settings
InceptionV3 (Without Augmentation)
InceptionV3 (Fig. 4)
MultiConvAttnNet A (Fig. 5a)
InceptionAB
MultiConvAttnNet B (Fig. 5b)
MultiConvAttnNet C (Fig. 6)
TABLE III
M EAN ABSOLUTE ERROR ( MAE ) AND ROOT MEAN SQUARE ERROR
( RMSE ) FROM THE PREDICTION WITH ITS ACTUAL VALUES
Test Data MAE RMSE
Single Camera 0.001 0.007
Multiple Camera (Cam A) 0.003 0.012
Multiple Camera (Cam B) 0.002 0.009
IV. C ONCLUSION
Our goal was to make use of real-world data to detect
river water levels using multiple sensor information such
as CCTV cameras and water level sensors. Traditionally,
image-based water level detection systems are constrained
with ideal environments for image capture. For example,
if CCTV cameras are focused at water gauges then any
derived models can only be applied at that particular location.
This paper proposes a deep learning approach of water level
detection in uncontrolled settings, such as when there is
no visible water gauge in an image. The proposed method
introduces two approaches, which are CNN using transfer
learning from pre-trained InceptionV3 and CNN with the
integration of attention mechanism. From the experimental
results, we achieve the following contributions: 1) a single
location model achieved a high accuracy of 93%. Since we
have no control over CCTV camera settings and many CCTV
cameras are not positioned at water gauges, our result is
better than current approaches in terms of practical use 2)
CNN architectures require a large number of images and
balanced data in each class. However, we show that using a
small number of images and imbalanced data from multiple
cameras with different positions and angles can achieve a
better result by applying data augmentation techniques. 3)
we introduced the integration of the attention mechanism to
the existing CNN architecture called MultiConvAttnNet to
help capture features from multiple cameras and resulted in
a reduction of computational costs and the number of model
parameters by more than half of the base model.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research project was partially supported by the Fac-
ulty of Information and Communication Technology, Mahi-
dol University, and the ICT International Collaboration Fund
of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and
Technology.
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TABLE II
Accuracy(%) Standard Deviation Parameters (M)
75.6 2.44 21.79
82.8 1.53 21.79
83.1 2.00 25.30
81.35 1.33 9.95
81.70 1.75 9.27
81.70 1.59 7.82
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