An efficient in-situ debris flow monitoring system over a wireless accelerometer network

Abstract

Debris flow disasters pose a serious threat to public safety in many areas all over the world, and it may cause severe consequences, including losses, injuries, and fatalities. With the emergence of deep learning and increased computation powers, nowadays, machine learning methods are being broadly acknowledged as a feasible solution to tackle the massive data generated from geo-informatics and sensing platforms to distill adequate information in the context of disaster monitoring. Aiming at detection of debris flow occurrences in a mountainous area of Sakurajima, Japan, this study demonstrates an efficient in-situ monitoring system which employs state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to exploit continuous monitoring data collected by a wireless accelerometer sensor network. Concretely, a two-stage data analysis process had been adopted, which consists of anomaly detection and debris flow event identification. The system had been validated with real data and generated favorable detection precision. Compared to other debris flow monitoring system, the proposed solution renders a batch of substantive merits, such as low-cost, high accuracy, and fewer maintenance efforts. Moreover, the presented data investigation scheme can be readily extended to deal with multi-modal data for more accurate debris monitoring, and we expect to expend addition sensory measurements shortly.