A new system aimed at improving the monitoring and detection of forest fires through advanced real-time image processing is reported in the International Journal of Information and Communication Technology. The work could lead to faster and more accurate detection and so help improve the emergency response to reduce the environmental, human, and economic impacts.
The team explains how their approach uses a bidirectional attention module (BAM). This allows it to focus on distinct characteristics of different image features and determine the relationships between adjacent areas in the image within the same feature. This dual approach improves the precision of fire boundary detection, particularly for small-scale fires that are often missed until they have grown much larger.
Tests with the model on a public dataset showed better performance than existing approaches in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency. This bolsters the potential for real-time fire detection, where early identification can prevent fires from spreading uncontrollably.
The new system has several advantages over standard fire detection methods, such as ground-based sensors and satellite imagery. These have limitations such as high maintenance costs, signal transmission issues, and interference from environmental factors such as clouds and rugged terrain.
