Image Processing and Localization for Detecting and Tracking Wildland Fires

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being used for a wide variety of applications including detecting and tracking wildland fires. Using UAVs for fire-fighting purposes reduces the human involvement for this high risk job. Such a mission involves locating the wildland fire, tracking the direction of spread of the fire and searching for human presence in the region. This paper investigates the algorithmic development for the use of UAVs to detect and track wildland fires. This would involve using the fuzzy toolbox in MATLAB along with MICRODEM, a software which provides the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) for the region. The objective of this research is to accomplish the following: 1) use genetic fuzzy based image processing tools to identify fire from the video feed obtained from the camera attached to the UAV in real time 2) look for human presence in the region and 3) estimate the location of the fire based on the geological data available for the region.