WASABI
WASABI brings together computer vision experts from HSRM with
colleagues from the National University University of Sciences
and Technology (NUST) in Islamabad / Pakistan. Pakistan ranks
third in water scarcity world-wide, and suffers from a lack of
proper water resource management. While drying up on the one
hand, the country experiences catastrophic floods on the
other. Therefore, to better manage water resources so that to
enforce an even distribution of water throughout the year, a
solution is required to densely supervise the volume of water
bodies (including rivers, lakes, and reservoirs) and predict the
ratio at which the water resources are varying. To this end, the
project WASABI (WAter resource estimation by SAtellite Based
Image analysis) aims at laying the foundations for a system that
quantitatively monitors Pakistan’s water bodies and helps
national authorities with a more proactive water supply
management. To do so, the WASABI system will employ remote
sensing satellite imagery of Pakistan’s water bodies. This data
will be processed with state-of-the-art machine learning / deep
learning techniques to estimate the current quantity of water
and - based on historic time series of population and seasonal
capacity fluctuation - predict the amount of water available in
the near future. WASABI‘s core research challenge lies in the
fact that labeled data for Pakistani waterbodies is scarce,

which is why unsupervised learning and transfer learning from
densely labeled regions such as Europe will be explored. The
project also features an academic exchange program, with interns
from NUST visiting Wiesbaden on an annual basis.