Multimedia rescue systems for floods

In the recent years, digitalization of disaster management has gained much importance in aspects of response, recovery and mitigation. Often, issues identified in past disaster response and relief efforts include lack of communication, delayed ordering of actions (e.g., evacuations), and low levels of preparedness by authorities during disasters. A rapid response in the event of a disaster requires good situational awareness and fast sharing of that knowledge across the community.We believe that a digital ecosystem based on multimedia computing can address this major challenge in the society. The role of technology in disaster management is to connect, inform and ultimately save the lives of those impacted by disasters. Multimedia analysis must expand to take advantage of this fact to benefit society, in particular, help during disasters. Data driven tools as part of new ecosystem can link resources and need to build an effective platform for use during disasters. To accomplish ecosystem coevolution, creating a collaborative system with crowdsourced data, spatial data, and historical data is essential. EventShop is one such tool used to detect and observe changing real-world situations in real-time. Multimedia micro-reports are global, powerful, impactful and spontaneous data streams which are obtained from applications like Krumbs, Twitter, Flickr, etc. These micro-reports assist EventShop in building a rescue system that provides rescue responses to victims during disasters. In this paper, we present a framework that uses EventShop and multimedia micro-reports to correspond with victims during one such disaster, the flood.