Experimental Fire Measurement with UAV Multimodal Stereovision

In wildfire research, systems that are able to estimate the geometric characteristics of fire, in order to understand and model the behavior of this spreading and dangerous phenomenon, are required. Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest in the use of computer vision and image processing technologies. The majority of these works have considered multiple mono-camera systems, merging the information obtained from each camera. Recent studies have introduced the use of stereovision in this field; for example, a framework with multiple ground stereo pairs of cameras has been developed to measure fires spreading for about 10 meters. This work proposes an unmanned aerial vehicle multimodal stereovision framework which allows for estimation of the geometric characteristics of fires propagating over long distances. The vision system is composed of two cameras operating simultaneously in the visible and infrared spectral bands. The main result of this work is the development of a portable drone system which is able to obtain georeferenced stereoscopic multimodal images associated with a method for the estimation of fire geometric characteristics. The performance of the proposed system is tested through various experiments, which reveal its efficiency and potential for use in monitoring wildfires.