Application of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) Photogrammetry for Forest Fire Early Detection System

Abstract

Indonesia has 15 big potential forest fires locations which destroyed twice the area annually. Moreover, there are almost 20 fire points for each location which increase gradually according to the satellite images of LAPAN (Lembaga Penerbangan dan Antariksa Nasional - National Institute of Aeronautics and Space of Indonesia). Therefore, some monitoring and early warning system for this disaster are needed to minimize the loss and damage of forest ecosystem, smoke exposure to human respiratory system, aviation business, and some forest related industries. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology could be proposed as the alternative to solve this problem. The forest is monitored by an UAV, in other hand it could be used for image data acquisition to construct 2D and 3D maps for further analysis of the early warning system. The images of sampling location had been taken by an UAV - DJI Phantom 4 Pro which automatically controlled by a flight plan using Pix4D Capture and processed by Pix4D Mapper. The sampling location took place in different areas: near a building, few km squares of campus area consists of building-vegetation combination, and three forest locations in two active volcanoes. The maps with Ground Sample Distance (GSD) under 3 cm/pixel result in under 1% error for X, Y and Z of 2D and 3D constructed maps. The maps also show an important finding where the movement object could be detected, which potential to be applied for fire evolution detection of a forest fire early warning system.