Drone based wildfire detection and modeling methods enable high-precision, real-time fire monitoring that is not provided by traditional remote fire monitoring systems, such as satellite imaging. Precise, real-time information enables rapid, effective wildfire intervention and management strategies. Drone systems’ ease of deployment, omnidirectional maneuverability, and robust sensing capabilities make them effective tools for early wildfire detection and evaluation, particularly so in environments that are inconvenient for humans and/or terrestrial vehicles. Development of emerging drone-based fire monitoring systems has been inhibited by a lack of well-annotated, high quality aerial wildfire datasets, largely as a result of UAV flight regulations for prescribed burns and wildfires. The included dataset provides a collection of side-by-side infrared and visible spectrum video pairs taken by drones during an open canopy prescribed fire in Northern Arizona in 2021. The frames have been classified by two independent classifiers with two binary classifications. The Fire label is applied when the classifiers visually observe indications of fire in either RGB or IR frame for each frame pair. The Smoke label is applied when the classifiers visually estimate that at least 50% of the RGB frame is filled with smoke. To provide additional context to the main dataset’s aerial imagery, the provided supplementary dataset includes weather information, the prescribed burn plan, a geo-referenced RGB point cloud of the preburn area, an RGB orthomosaic of the preburn area, and links to further information.
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Wildfire Monitoring in Remote Areas using Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
In this paper, we propose a drone-based wildfire monitoring system for remote and hard-to-reach areas. This system utilizes autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with the main advantage of providing on-demand monitoring service faster than the current approaches of using satellite images, manned aircraft and remotely controlled drones. Furthermore, using autonomous drones facilitates minimizing human intervention in risky wildfire zones. In particular, to develop a fully autonomous system, we propose a distributed leader-follower coalition formation model to cluster a set of drones into multiple coalitions that collectively cover the designated monitoring field. The coalition leader is a drone that employs observer drones potentially with different sensing and imaging capabilities to hover in circular paths and collect imagery information from the impacted areas. The objectives of the proposed system include: i) to cover the entire fire zone with a minimum number of drones, and ii) to minimize the energy consumption and latency of the available drones to fly to the fire zone. Simulation results confirm that the performance of the proposed system- without the need for inter-coalition communications- approaches that of a centrally-optimized system.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1755984
- PAR ID:
- 10133280
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 835 to 840
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/INFCOMW.2019.8845309
