SYSTEM FOR REMOTE FOREST FIRE DETECTION

Forest fires are a universal problem that both confronts and confounds many countries. Such fires not only destroy a large amount of natural resources, but also destroy wildlife and their natural habitat, wreak general havoc on ecosystems and create environmental pollution. For all that, fire fighting is one of today's most important matters for natural and environmental resource protection and preservation. The growing concern regarding environmental devastation of this kind is the underlying reason for the development of modern fire-detection system. Forest-fire automatic detection is a complex problem that involves substantial amount of various sensorial information and data. Furthermore, the reliability of automatic defection systems is still a significant issue in the domain. This paper presents a scheme a an integrated system for early detection of forest res. The system uses a telecommunication network to link several components for cooperative detection. The perception system is based on a network of sensorial stations and central stations. The sensorial stations collect data including infrared and visual images and meteorological information. The central stations exchange data to perform distributed analysis. An implementation of the system has been carried out at the Ruder Boskovic Institute, Centre for Informatics and Computing. The paper includes some experiments carried out in the Natural Park of island Mljet and Molat (Croatia) [1].