# HydroVision: LiDAR-Guided Hydrometric Prediction with Vision Transformers and Hybrid Graph Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.15213 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15213/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Connecting the Dots: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11650/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02842/) (2020)
- [Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02908/) (2020)
- [Discrete Graph Structure Learning for Forecasting Multiple Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06861/) (2021)
- [GaAN: Gated Attention Networks for Learning on Large and Spatiotemporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07294/) (2018)
- [AMMUS : A Survey of Transformer-based Pretrained Models in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05542/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Causal Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07019/) (2023)
- [Simpler is better: Multilevel Abstraction with Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network Cells for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03858/) (2022)
- [TransGlow: Attention-augmented Transduction model based on Graph Neural Networks for Water Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05961/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hydrometric forecasting is crucial for managing water resources, flood prediction, and environmental protection. Water stations are interconnected, and this connectivity influences the measurements at other stations. However, the dynamic and implicit nature of water flow paths makes it challenging to extract a priori knowledge of the connectivity structure. We hypothesize that terrain elevation significantly affects flow and connectivity. To incorporate this, we use LiDAR terrain elevation data encoded through a Vision Transformer (ViT). The ViT, which has demonstrated excellent performance in image classification by directly applying transformers to sequences of image patches, efficiently captures spatial features of terrain elevation. To account for both spatial and temporal features, we employ GRU blocks enhanced with graph convolution, a method widely used in the literature. We propose a hybrid graph learning structure that combines static and dynamic graph learning. A static graph, derived from transformer-encoded LiDAR data, captures terrain elevation relationships, while a dynamic graph adapts to temporal changes, improving the overall graph representation. We apply graph convolution in two layers through these static and dynamic graphs. Our method makes daily predictions up to 12 days ahead. Empirical results from multiple water stations in Quebec demonstrate that our method significantly reduces prediction error by an average of 10% across all days, with greater improvements for longer forecasting horizons.