Enhancing wildfire detection: a novel algorithm for controllable generation of wildfire smoke images

Background The lack of wildfire smoke image data is one of the most important factors hindering the development of image-based wildfire detection. Smoke image generation based on image inpainting techniques is a solution worthy of study. However, it is difficult to generate smoke texture with context consistency in complex backgrounds with current image inpainting methods. Aims This work aims to provide a wildfire smoke image database for specific scenarios. Methods We designed an algorithm based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate smoke images. The algorithm includes a multi-scale fusion module to ensure consistency between the generated smoke and backgrounds. Additionally, a local feature-matching mechanism in the discriminator guides the generator to capture real smoke’s feature distribution. Key results We generated 13,400 wildfire smoke images based on forest background images and early fire simulation from the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS). Conclusions A variety of advanced object detection algorithms were trained based on the generated data. The experimental results confirmed that the addition of the generated data to the real datasets can effectively improve model performance. Implications This study paves a way for generating object datasets to enhance the reliability of watchtower or satellite wildfire monitoring.