Obscured Wildfire Flame Detection By Temporal Analysis of Smoke Patterns Captured by Unmanned Aerial Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a deep learning-based method for real-time wildfire detection from drone footage, focusing on obscured flames using temporal smoke pattern analysis, achieving high accuracy and outperforming existing approaches.

Contribution

Introduces a novel temporal analysis approach with a deep CNN architecture for detecting obscured wildfires in drone videos, improving accuracy over previous methods.

Findings

Achieves a Dice score of 85.88% in fire detection.

Reaches 92.47% precision and 90.67% accuracy on test data.

Attains 100% video-level fire classification accuracy with MobileNet+CBAM.

Abstract

This research paper addresses the challenge of detecting obscured wildfires (when the fire flames are covered by trees, smoke, clouds, and other natural barriers) in real-time using drones equipped only with RGB cameras. We propose a novel methodology that employs semantic segmentation based on the temporal analysis of smoke patterns in video sequences. Our approach utilizes an encoder-decoder architecture based on deep convolutional neural network architecture with a pre-trained CNN encoder and 3D convolutions for decoding while using sequential stacking of features to exploit temporal variations. The predicted fire locations can assist drones in effectively combating forest fires and pinpoint fire retardant chemical drop on exact flame locations. We applied our method to a curated dataset derived from the FLAME2 dataset that includes RGB video along with IR video to determine the ground truth. Our proposed method has a unique property of detecting obscured fire and achieves a Dice score of 85.88%, while achieving a high precision of 92.47% and classification accuracy of 90.67% on test data showing promising results when inspected visually. Indeed, our method outperforms other methods by a significant margin in terms of video-level fire classification as we obtained about 100% accuracy using MobileNet+CBAM as the encoder backbone.