Flood water level prediction and tracking using particle filter algorithm

Most of the countries have paid great attention to flood water level monitoring and tracking because flood may damages people´s life and property. Since flood water level fluctuate highly nonlinear, it is very difficult to predict the flood water level. The particle filter algorithm is well known as a very effective solution for handling nonlinear problems. Thus, in this paper, this algorithm is applied to predict the flood water level. There are many variations of particle filter. This paper proposes Sequential Importance Sampling (SIS) particle filter to solve the above mentioned problem. SIS is the basic particle filter. However, the problems with SIS particle filter are the particle degeneration phenomenon, when after a few iterations only a few particles have nonzero weight. So, Sampling Importance Resampling (SIR) particle filter is also introduced as the improved particle filter. From the simulation results using Matlab, SIR particle filter outperforms SIS particle filter by comparing the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) value.