Abstract
Thermographic imaging has been the preferred technology for the detection and tracking of wildfires for many years. Thermographic cameras provide some very important advantages, such as the ability to remotely detect hotspots which could potentially turn into wildfires if the appropriate conditions are met. Also, they can serve as a key preventive method, especially when the 30-30-30 rule is met, which describes a situation where the ambient temperature is higher than 30 C, the relative humidity is lower than 30%, and the wind speed is higher than 30 km/h. Under these circumstances, the likelihood of a wildfire outburst is quite high, and its effects can be catastrophic due to the high-speed winds and dry conditions. If this sort of scenario actually occurs, every possible technological advantage shall be used by firefighting teams to enable the rapid and efficient coordination of their response teams and to control the wildfire following a safe and well-planned strategy. However, most of the early detection methods for wildfires, such as the aforementioned thermographic cameras, lack a sufficient level of automation and usually rely on human interaction, imposing high degrees of subjectivity and latency. This is especially critical when a high volume of data is required in real time to correctly support decision-making scenarios during the wildfire suppression tasks. The present paper addresses this situation by analyzing the challenges faced by a fully autonomous wildfire detection and a tracking system containing a fully automated wildfire georeferencing system based on synthetic vision technology. Such a tool would provide firefighting teams with a solution capable of continuously surveilling a particular area and completely autonomously identifying and providing georeferenced information on current or potential wildfires in real time.
Highlights
Wildfires are one of the main reasons behind the devastation of extremely large rural and wildland areas
Assuming that the optics of the thermographic camera do not introduce any distortions or that they are negligible in a far-field situation, the minimum possible error the georeferencing system could have at a given distance in terms of ability to detect a wildfire depends on the camera’s resolution, sensor size, and focal distance
The Johnson criteria [17] determine that at least 1.5 pixels should be used to detect any feature, meaning that we need to effectively multiply our Instantaneous Field of View (IFOV) by a factor of 1.5. This affects the maximum operational distance of the thermographic camera, and using the same example as before, the camera needs to be located at a maximum distance of 976 m to be able to detect a hotspot of 1 m2 based on Johnson’s criteria
Summary
Wildfires are one of the main reasons behind the devastation of extremely large rural and wildland areas. A system capable of solving these limitations was implemented in [13] It relies on an innovative use of synthetic vision technology, combined with a fully automated and rapidly deployable thermographic camera to detect and track the evolution of a wildfire in a completely autonomous manner (RDMU: Rapidly Deployable Mobile Unit). This system can be resiliently operated and accessed remotely for data retrieval over a series of telecommunications networks, should any of them cease to function during an emergency situation. As both the synthetic and thermographic images have been generated using the same FOV, resolution, and overall optical characteristics, each pixel in the two images can be individually cross-referenced between them
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