Forest Fire Monitoring from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Deep Learning

Forest fires pose a serious threat to the environment with the potential of causing ecological harm, financial losses, and human casualties. While research suggests that climate change will increase the frequency and severity of these fires, recent developments in deep learning and convolutional neural networks (CNN) have greatly enhanced fire detection techniques and capability. These models can be leveraged by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to automatically monitor burning areas. However, drones can carry only limited computational and power resources; therefore, on-board computing capabilities are constrained by hardware limitations. This work focuses on the design of segmentation models to identify and localize active burning areas from aerial RGB images processed on limited computing resources. To achieve this goal, the research compares the performance of different variants of the DeepLabv3 neural network model for fire segmentation when trained and tested with the FLAME dataset using a k-fold cross validation approach. Experimental results are compared with U-Net, a benchmark model used with the FLAME dataset, by implementing this model in the same codebase as the DeepLabv3 model. This work demonstrates that a refined version of DeepLabv3, with a MobileNetv2 backbone using pretrained layers and a simplified atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module, yields a similar performance to U-Net, with a precision of 87.8% and a recall of 83.2%, while only requiring 20% of the number of parameters involved with the U-Net topology. This significantly reduces memory and power consumption, enabling longer UAV flight duration and reducing the processing overhead associated with sensor input, making it more suitable for deployment on unmanned aerial vehicles. The model’s compact architecture, implemented using TensorFlow and Keras for model design and training, along with OpenCV for image preprocessing, makes it portable and easy to integrate with edge devices such as NVIDIA Jetson boards.