Management of an infrared imaging system for wildfire monitoring

Abstract

In this work, we present our system architecture developed to manage and pre- and post-process TIR (thermal infrared) imagery for wildfire applications. It is mainly composed of an acquisition module, a preprocessing unit and a GUI graphical interface for post-processing analysis. Specific data-acquisition software was developed to overcome the limitations of the applications provided by camera manufacturers. This data acquisition module was complemented with a pre-processing unit to deal with those videos already recorded using manufacturers’ software. This pre-processing unit converts stored IR raw files (which are unreadable) into a standard format that allows an overall thermal analysis. Our system can handle video formats used by two of the most important IR camera providers, i.e. Optris and FLIR. Finally, a graphical interface application provides the user with a user-friendly menu to detect fire edge position at desired time steps (i.e. automated perimeter tracking), to calculate rate of spread maps and interact with the data-driven forecasting module. This system makes two important contributions. First, it constitutes a common framework that ensures coherence in the treatment of IR data, no matter how it was obtained. Additionally, it incorporates the image processing algorithms in which we have been working for the past years, making them easy-to-use and facilitating the analysis of their result.