Artificial Intelligence and Automation in Creating Recorded Flood Extents

As part of Ambition 5 of the FCRM Mapping & Modelling plan, the Environment Agency would like to try and automate as many manual processes involving mapping and modelling data and information as possible. One of the potential processes identified as having the potential for automation is the creation of recorded flood outlines from historic photographs.

The primary outcome of this commission is to complete an initial discovery piece of work, including a potential proof of concept, to investigate whether Artificial Intelligence and automation can be used to generate a 'first draft' recorded flood outline using a range of historic flood photographs. This work will potentially help save a significant amount of staff time in creating recorded flood extents after a flood event. This is currently quite a manually intensive process and so any improvements we can offer will be welcomed by area operations teams.

The Consultant will focus on the use of both Oblique and ground level photographs in testing different methods of AI to create these extents.