Fire Detection Using Both Infrared and Visual Images With Application to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Forest Fire Surveillance

Abstract Forest fires are a universal problem that destroy a large amount of natural resources and creates environmental pollution. Forest firefighting is one of today’s most important events for natural and environmental resources protection and conservation. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with remote sensing system can offer a rapid, safe and low-cost approach for effective forest fire detection which have attracted researchers attention worldwide. In this paper, automatic detection of fire regions using both visual and infrared images is investigated. In order to improve the computational performance to satisfy the requirement of real-time processing, a reduced complexity fusion method is adopted in this research. Through testing the proposed approach on real video sequences, good detection performance is achieved and it is indicated that using multi-modal camera system to detect forest fire with application to firefighting UAV is very promising.