Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Innovative Mechanisms for Industry Applications (ICIMIA 2020)

IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20K58-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-4167-1

Low Cost IoT based Flood Monitoring System

Using Machine Learning and Neural Networks
Flood Alerting and Rainfall prediction

Dola Sheeba Rani Dr. Jayalakshmi G N Dr. Vishwanath P Baligar

School of Computer Science and School of Computer Science and School of Computer Science and
Engineering Engineering Engineering
KLE Technological University KLE Technological University KLE Technological University
Huballi, Karnataka-580020 Huballi, Karnataka-580020 Huballi, Karnataka- 580020
sheebadjf@gmail.com jaya_gn@kletech.ac.in vpbaligar@kletech.ac.in

Abstract—The term Internet of Things [IoT] refers
to the ever expanding complex system of basic things
that emphasize communication between computing
objects, devices and systems by offering connectivity
from anyplace and at any time. It is estimated that by
the end of 2020, 50 billion devices are said to be
connected. IoT technologies play a crucial role to
encompass many smart applications in real life. On the
other hand, the crosscutting nature of IoT components
and systems, introduce new security challenges. IoT
covers advantages for various fields like agriculture,
industry, healthcare, automobiles and home automation
for improving and automating various day-to-day
activities. Flood is usually caused either by change in the
state of water body or due to the overflow of rivers,
dams, etc. Due to advanced civilization and improved
human life, environment problems also tend to increase.
This paper includes the effective and flexible method for
the detection of flood and alerting system. The most
advanced technologies like machine learning (ML)
provide significant boon to the field of technology are
very powerful in monitoring the normal and abnormal
behavioral characters of any machine. The objective of
this work is to survey on flood issues. Neural networks
are most popular, widely used for rainfall forecasting
and perform efficiently.
Keywords—Machine learning, internet of things,
neural networks, sensors, embedded system, linear
regression, logistic regression, SVM.
I. INTRODUCTION
In the year 2019, there was a heavy rainfall in the
India that created much loss for 13 states, which
included loss of at least 200 people and millions of
them were misplaced. The most affected region was
Karnataka and Maharashtra. Many places such as
coastal areas or the places nearing the river or dams
are also prone to flood disaster. To develop a real
time flood monitoring and alerting system to reduce
the exposure to the flood on real time basis, which
require speed in change of river. In this system we
make use of three rain sensors and three water
sensors, which are kept at three different locations;
also a raspberry pi with water sensors, rain sensors.
This system predicts the flood and alert is produced
for respective authorities while sounding instant
alarm in nearby villages to transmit message about
possible floods using IoT. The system also calculates
the time taken for the flood to reach the desired area.
Water flow sensors measure the water level in an
water body, whereas rain sensors measure the
intensity of rainfall in millimeters. The entire
information can be viewed from a remote location,
providing the required information on IoT gecko
platform.
Rainfall main environment factor to influence the
probability of flood, and a many of machine learning
models were assessed for flood prediction models.
The main contribution of the paper presents the
contribution of machine learning models. The work
on the innovation of flood prediction models have
contributed to minimize the loss of human life,
decrease disaster, and reduce destruction of properties
and valuables. This paper provides the machine
learning technique, to predict the arrival of floods, by
considering the rainfall data from previously
available data to predict the rainfall for next month.
While building model, it does not require any
meteorological and geographical knowledge about its
hydraulic and topographic properties. From the
survey, the existing flood forecasting models are:
radar systems, hydrographic analysis, rain gauge
network, stream networks, linear statistical models
and time series analysis prediction models; these
models helped to forecast rainfall in the previous
years. The ML models used in this work for training
are logistic regression, linear regression, SVM, neural
networks. Rainfall prediction is considered very
important, in the aspects of monsoon times. By
considering the rainfall of previous data, prediction

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 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Innovative Mechanisms for Industry Applications (ICIMIA 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20K58-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-4167-1
can be done for both short-term and long-term rainfall
prediction for next consecutive months/ weeks. To
predict or forecast the rainfall, data is retained from
Indian meteorological department. Two different
datasets that consists of average rainfall data from
1951-2000 for every month and each district; second
data is of 1901-2015, which consists average rainfall
data for each state is used. The performance of
trained models were evaluated on mean absolute error
and standard deviation.
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
Flood issues in India are devastating, to implement
real time flood monitoring systems, many of the
models have been used so far, with different networks
for wireless sensor networks, and some energy
efficient models.
A. A Survey on Flood issues implemented on IoT
Ivan Stoianov; 2007 [1]- Presented the use of
PIPENET ( A system based on WSN) that detects,
localize and quantify bursts, leaks and other water
abnormalities such as blockages in the pipelines.
F. Shebli; 2007 [2] - Presented the method to
calculate the amount of energy consumption by
sensors in an network, according to data flow rate,
number of nodes and distance between them.
Jong-uk Lee; 2008 [3] - Presented a real time
flood monitoring system with WSN which is
deployed in 2 Volcanic islands. This measures river
and weather conditions through Wireless sensors
integrated with different sensors.
Sultanullah Jadoon,; 2011 [4] - Presented efficient
water management system in Pakistan by least cost
framework based on sensor network, to manage
maintenance of water resources and controlling water
wastage.
Victor Seal; 2012 [5] - Presents flood forecasting
model designed using WSN, this model predicts
floods in rivers using the simple calculations to
provide real time results and save the lives of people
by ringing alarm.
Naveed Ahmad; 2013 [6] - A simulation tool to
identify pre and post disaster flood risk analysis by
using AdHoc WSN and Presented a study of flood
analysis and prediction using GIS(Geographical
Information system).
B. A Survey on Flood forcasting and prediction
using ML
Jimeno-Sáez; 2007 [7] – by applying Artificial
neural networks for the data set collected from
fourteen stream flow gauge stations, presented a flash
flood.
FJ Chang; 2006 [8] – by collecting data from five
gauges from 1971 to 2001 of water levels has been
used. Successfully provided a water level forecasting,
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for predicting water levels for 1-3 hourly basis before
flooding.
Rezaeianzadeh; 2014 [9] - by collecting dataset
from multiple meteorological stations. Presents many
forecasting systems for daily flow prediction using
ANN and multiple linear regressions. Furthermore,
the performance of the models is calculated.
Choubin; 2018 [9] - evaluated the accuracy of
artificial neural networks, but by considering three
common ML modeling tools, of CART, SVM, and
MLP. The result evaluated that CART performed
well.
Kim and Singh 2013 [10] - presented, three
prediction models of generalized regression ANN
(GRNNM), Kohonen self-organizing feature maps
ANN (KSOFM-NNM), and MLP for flood prediction
and finally evaluated performance of models.
Chang, Shen 2014 [11] - presented an advanced
hybrid model, by artificial neural networks for
casting real time flood forecasting model.
Partal and Cigizoglu 2009 [12] - presented a daily
forecasting water level, by using WNN and ANN
models.
From the survey, the existing system presents
flood issues by interfacing IoT with Wireless sensor
Networks; also minimizing the energy consumption
by sensors in an network. Further the survey brings
out the works of implementing the Real-time flood
monitoring system to ease the flood issues.
III. OBJECTIVES
1. To develop the Flood Monitoring System.
2. To interface water level detector and
warning with PC-based system and to send
warning messages to the intended users.
3. To pre-process historical weather data into a
form that is suitable for training and to
identify the salient variables for training
models.
4. To determine the architecture of ML models
that yield the best predictive performance for
precipitation.
5. To predict the results by using various
machine learning models and to analyse the
performance of each model.
IV. PROPOSED SYSTEM
Design and implement IoT based flood monitoring
and alerting system and calculate the time it would
take for the flood to reach them and provides a time
to people so that they can evacuate accordingly.
Predict the severity of rainfall by machine learning
models.
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 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Innovative Mechanisms for Industry Applications (ICIMIA 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20K58-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-4167-1

V. BASIC COMPONENTS /TECHNOLOGIES USED
A. PCB ( printed circuit board)
A printed circuit board is a thin fiber glass that is
used in in different electronic devices such as laptops,
computers, and microcontrollers; where small
electrical components like transistor, capacitors, IC’s,
resistors, diodes etc are connected by imprinted path
etched on the board.
B. Water- float sensors
Water- level sensors are used for measuring the
continuous flow of the water or liquid content in a
water system. The various applications of these
sensors are used in water tanks, water-level
indicators, water-level alarms etc. The average life
cycle of this sensor is of 15 years. This sensor will
not deteriorate. The circuit of this sensor consists of
GND and VCC. This sensor senses the level of water
and actuates the pump or initiates an alarm by a
buzzer.
of this system includes a flow diagram for rainfall
prediction using ML models.
A. Block diagram of IoT interfacing with IoTGecko:
Flood monitoring module consists of many hardware
components like raspberry pi 3, Wi-Fi module, TFT
display, water sensor, rain drop sensor, resistors,
capacitors, transistors, cables and connectors,
diodes, PCB, LCD, transformer/adapter, push
buttons, switch, IC. Interfacing all these components
on PCB, with raspberry pi, along with three rain drop
sensors and water level sensors will be placed at
different locations. When the water level rises in the
water body, the buzzer is beeped and the system gives
an alert message; with the time remaining to flood in
the area.

C. Rain drop sensors

This is a most easy tool for rainfall detection. For
measuring the intensity of rainfall, this can be used as
sensor. This module consists of 4 pins; GND, VCC,
Digital output, Analogue output; the output can be
connected to rain board or bread board. The
applications of this sensor are used in irrigation
systems, satellite communications, and automobile.
D. Raspberry Pi
Raspberry pi is a low cost, credit card sized
microprocessor, which is plugged into a monitor or
display. This uses a DC power supply, keyboard, and
mouse. It runs on NOOBS operating system. It is
capable of doing all the operations performed by
computer; playing a HD video, computational
operations, play games etc.
Fig 4.1: Block diagram of IoT architecture
E. NOOBS
The development of this project is firstly to choose,
New Out Of Box Software (NOOBS) is an easy the right development board, designing the circuit
installer, an operating system for raspberry pi. Its board, PCB printing, lastly finding the connectivity
open, automatically generated by installing from local issues, the coding is done on python. This platform is
software or from a remote repository. built on a cloud platform, IoT Gecko. The
information sent by the sensors, can be monitored
F. IoT Gecko from any place, just by providing username and
IoT is growing day by day, with more connected password.
device. IoT helps to control more than one object
connect by internet to develop IoT board on own; IoT
Gecko is an open platform with API support for
development boards like Arduino, raspberry pi, and
other microcontroller boards. By setting up the
devices, the system can directly run on the cloud
platform.
VI. ARCHITECTURE
Flood monitoring and alerting system is built by
interfacing IoT hardware with Gecko platform, which
can be monitored by a remote location. The next part

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 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Innovative Mechanisms for Industry Applications (ICIMIA 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20K58-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-4167-1

VII. RESULTS AND SNAPSHOTS

A. Intefracing hardware with raspberry pi

The above setup shows the real time working of

Fig 4.2: Circuit Diagram of PCB embedded with flood monitoring, this prototype measures the water
hardware components. level in the flood prone area, 3 water sensors and rain
drop sensors measure the intensity of flood.
B. Basic flow of building ML model for rainfall
prediction. B. LCD display steup with PCB components:
To build a rainfall prediction system, meteorological
data, history, many sensing devices etc are required.
The basic traditional water flow data, and other water
gauges.

Fig 4.3: Basic flow diagram of ML rainfall

prediction model
There are three rain drop sensors in the system, which
Finally the models were to undergo training and measures the rainfall in mm/hr, the left description is
testing. about showing the time left out to flood the area.

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 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Innovative Mechanisms for Industry Applications (ICIMIA 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20K58-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-4167-1

C. Monitoring over IoTgecko: D. Linear Regression model for rainfall prediction

For linear regression the model prediction data is

formatted in the way, that give the rainfall in the last
three months by try to predict the rainfall in the next
consecutive month, and drawing a straight line where
X(Time duration) and Y (Rainfall Measurement).
Testing metrics: used Mean absolute error to train
this model is 40.2467874.

Observations: All means are standard deviation

observations are written, first one represents ground
truth, second one represents predictions.

Readings from the sensors transmitted to the Gecko

cloud. The table shows the results of the sensors and
time taking to flood the area.

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 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Innovative Mechanisms for Industry Applications (ICIMIA 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20K58-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-4167-1
E. Support Vector Machine.
For SVM the model prediction data is formatted in
the way, that give the rainfall in the last three months
by try to predict the rainfall in the next consecutive
month, and drawing a hyperplane to separate the
classes and objects. Testing metrics: used Mean
absolute error to train this model is 90.606787.
Observations: All means are standard deviation
observations are written, first one represents ground
truth, second one represents predictions,Bad
performance by SVR
model.
F. Artificial Neural Networks
Observations indicate that machine learning models
won’t perform well for prediction models. Therefore
by using Convolution neural networks, 1-D is
employed in classifying data, which uses the X axis
data as time duration and Y axis as rainfall in mm,
and the obtained absolute mean error is 21.8097545
Observations: Neural networks perform better than
ML predicting models.
VIII. CONCLUSION.
Flood is caused when a dam fractures, curtly
releasing an immense gallons of water. The result is
that a much of the water gets into soil, leading
stagnation and causing flooding in the area prone to
flood. River banks or any water body residing after
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flood, privation of house and office property, streets
causing flood water consists of bacteria and sewage
flow of waste sites and chemical spillage which leads
to a variety of diseases later on. Implementation of
flood monitoring and alerting system leads to
minimization to flood exposure, having time left to
evacuate the area, getting time and help to flood
control structures. Various visualizations of data are
observed which helps in implementing the
approaches for prediction. An observation indicates
machine learning models won’t work well for
prediction of rainfall due to fluctuations in rainfall.
However this method can be used for prediction for
any state of India, with the given data. Designed and
implemented the flood monitoring and alerting
system and also helps to predict rainfall for the future
use successfully.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The successful completion of any task is
incomplete without complementing those who made it
possible and whose guidance and encouragement
made my effort successful.
I am indebted to my beloved Guide Dr. Jayalakshmi
G N who was constant source of enthusiasm and
whose sincere guidance, valuable suggestions and
benevolent direction where mainly responsible for my
successful completion of the project.. I also thank
K.L.E Technological University for providing
computational support.
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IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20K58-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-4167-1

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