Forest Fire Detection Based on Spatial Characteristics of Surface Temperature

Amidst the escalating threat of global warming, which manifests in more frequent forest fires, the prompt and accurate detection of forest fires has ascended to paramount importance. The current surveillance algorithms employed for forest fire monitoring—including, but not limited to, fixed threshold algorithms, multi-channel threshold algorithms, and contextual algorithms—rely primarily upon the degree of deviation between the pixel temperature and the background temperature to discern pyric events. Notwithstanding, these algorithms typically fail to account for the spatial heterogeneity of the background temperature, precipitating the consequential oversight of low-temperature fire point pixels, thus impeding the expedited detection of fires in their initial stages. For the amelioration of this deficiency, the present study introduces a spatial feature-based (STF) method for forest fire detection, leveraging Himawari-8/9 imagery as the main data source, complemented by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) DEM data inputs. Our proposed modality reconstructs the surface temperature information via selecting the optimally designated machine learning model, subsequently identifying the fire point through utilizing the difference between the reconstructed surface temperatures and empirical observations, in tandem with the spatial contextual algorithm. The results confirm that the random forest model demonstrates superior efficacy in the reconstruction of the surface temperature. Benchmarking the STF method against both the fire point datasets disseminated by the China Forest and Grassland Fire Prevention and Suppression Network (CFGFPN) and the Wild Land Fire (WLF) fire point product validation datasets from Himawari-8/9 yielded a zero rate of omission errors and a comprehensive evaluative index, predominantly surpassing 0.74. These findings show that the STF method proposed herein significantly augments the identification of lower-temperature fire point pixels, thereby amplifying the sensitivity of forest surveillance.