Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Systems, hereafter referred to as UAS, are of great use in hazard events such as wildfire due to their ability to provide high-resolution video imagery over areas deemed too dangerous for manned aircraft and ground crews. This aerial perspective allows for identification of ground-based hazards such as spot fires and fire lines, and to communicate this information with fire fighting crews. Current technology relies on visual interpretation of UAS imagery, with little to no computer-assisted automatic detection. With the help of big labeled data and the significant increase of computing power, deep learning has seen great successes on object detection with fixed patterns, such as people and vehicles. However, little has been done for objects, such as spot fires, with amorphous and irregular shapes. Additional challenges arise when data are collected via UAS as high-resolution aerial images or videos; an ample solution must provide reasonable accuracy with low delays. In this paper, we examined 4K ((Formula presented.)) videos collected by UAS from a controlled burn and created a set of labeled video sets to be shared for public use. We introduce a coarse-to-fine framework to auto-detect wildfires that are sparse, small, and irregularly-shaped. The coarse detector adaptively selects the sub-regions that are likely to contain the objects of interest while the fine detector passes only the details of the sub-regions, rather than the entire 4K region, for further scrutiny. The proposed two-phase learning therefore greatly reduced time overhead and is capable of maintaining high accuracy. Compared against the real-time one-stage object backbone of YoloV3, the proposed methods improved the mean average precision(mAP) from (Formula presented.) to (Formula presented.), with an average inference speed of 7.44 frames per second. Limitations and future work are discussed with regard to the design and the experiment results.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 166-179 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | AI (Switzerland) |
Volume | 1 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 2020 |
Externally published | Yes |
Funding
This research was partially funded by the Purdue Polytechnic Institute. Acknowledgments
Funders | Funder number |
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Purdue Polytechnic Institute |
Keywords
- dataset
- deep learning
- high resolution images
- unmanned aerial systems
- wildfire detection