In recent years, the frequency and severity of forest fire occurrence have increased, compelling the research communities to actively search for early forest fire detection and suppression methods. Remote sensing using computer vision techniques can provide early detection from a large field of view along with providing additional information such as location and severity of the fire. Over the last few years, the feasibility of forest fire detection by combining computer vision and aerial platforms such as manned and unmanned aerial vehicles, especially low cost and small-size unmanned aerial vehicles, have been experimented with and have shown promise by providing detection, geolocation, and fire characteristic information. This paper adds to the existing research by proposing a novel method of detecting forest fire using color and multi-color space local binary pattern of both flame and smoke signatures and a single artificial neural network. The training and evaluation images in this paper have been mostly obtained from aerial platforms with challenging circumstances such as minuscule flame pixels, varying illumination and range, complex backgrounds, occluded flame and smoke regions, and smoke blending into the background. The proposed method has achieved F1 scores of 0.84 for flame and 0.90 for smoke while maintaining a processing speed of 19 frames per second. It has outperformed support vector machine, random forest, Bayesian classifiers and YOLOv3, and has demonstrated the capability of detecting challenging flame and smoke regions of a wide range of sizes, colors, textures, and opacity.
Use of unmanned aerial vehicles for automated forest fire patrols in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia)
