Automatic Forest-Fire Measuring Using Ground Stations and Unmanned Aerial Systems

This paper presents a novel system for automatic forest-fire measurement using cameras distributed at ground stations and mounted on Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). It can obtain geometrical measurements of forest fires in real-time such as the location and shape of the fire front, flame height and r...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Martínez de Dios, José Ramiro, Merino, Luis, Caballero Benítez, Fernando, Ollero Baturone, Aníbal
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2011
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repositorio:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/56977
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/11441/56977
https://doi.org/10.3390
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Perception systems
Unmanned Aerial Systems
Forest fires
Descripción
Sumario:This paper presents a novel system for automatic forest-fire measurement using cameras distributed at ground stations and mounted on Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). It can obtain geometrical measurements of forest fires in real-time such as the location and shape of the fire front, flame height and rate of spread, among others. Measurement of forest fires is a challenging problem that is affected by numerous potential sources of error. The proposed system addresses them by exploiting the complementarities between infrared and visual cameras located at different ground locations together with others onboard Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). The system applies image processing and geo-location techniques to obtain forest-fire measurements individually from each camera and then integrates the results from all the cameras using statistical data fusion techniques. The proposed system has been extensively tested and validated in close-to-operational conditions in field fire experiments with controlled safety conditions carried out in Portugal and Spain from 2001 to 2006.