A Survey of Forest Fire Detection Techniques

The most important parts of protective and observe systems are the fire detection systems. Fire detection is very significant for the safety of the people. In past there were many methods used in forest fire detection. This paper presents a new type of system which uses Un-manned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), wireless technology and power of artificial intelligence for forest fire detection. The unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) will keep the forest under surveillance through auto piloting and transmits real-time video to the base station using wireless communication based on the acquired data. The base station decides and takes control over UAV (eg. Moving left, right, rotating etc.) and also in base station pattern classification is used to detect whether any fire exists in forest, if it so drone becomes stationary and provides live video of fire and fire alert signal is established. KeywordsUAV (Drone), sensor, satellite, camera, Feedforward neural network. INTRODUCTION Forests are the protectors of earth’s ecological balance. Unfortunately, the forest fire is usually only observed when it has already spread over a large area, making its control and stoppage arduous and even impossible at times. The result is devastating loss and irreparable damage to the environment and atmosphere (30% of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere comes from forest fires) [1], in addition to irreparable damage to the ecology (huge amounts of smoke and carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere). Among other terrible consequences of forest fires are long-term disastrous effects such as impacts on local weather patterns, global warming, and extinction of rare species of the flora and fauna. Fire detection and monitoring is required to reduce damage to forest. Fire detection is necessary for the safety of the people. Millions of hectares of forests are destroyed by fire every year. Specifically, forest surveillance and early forest fire detection have important relevance. These tasks have been usually carried out by means of lookouts on the affected areas. Professional people in watchtowers is the most broadly used method. Use of satellites and satellite images are another technology for detecting forest fires. Earthorbiting satellites and even air-floating devices have been employed for observation and detection of forest fires. Satellite images gathered by two main satellites launched for forest fire detection purposes, the advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR) [2], launched in 1998, and the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS), launched in 1999, have been used [3,4]. Unfortunately, these satellites can provide images of the regions of the earth every two days and that is a long time for fire scanning; besides the quality of satellite images can be affected by weather conditions [5]. Several sensor technologies have already been applied for detecting fire. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been applied in forest fire detection. Applications of wireless sensor networks are environmental and health monitoring; military target tracking and INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ADVANCED RESEARCH IN COMPUTER SCIENCE AND APPLICATIONS ISSN 2321-872X ONLINE ISSN 2321-8932 PRINT VOLUME 2, ISSUE 12, DECEMBER 2014. www.ijarcsa.org 31 [email protected] ww w. ija rc sa .or g surveillance; animals, humans and vehicle tracking and disaster recovery. Smoke detection method is one of the useful and challenging problems mainly in open environment, such as port, chemical plants and power plants as they cause abuse to surrounding areas. In such areas, fire or flame detection methods [6] are limited because fire or flames sources cannot always fall properly into the range of sensors due to their positions and sizes. Smoke detection is good and effective for early fire detection in such cases. In conventional methods heat or smoke sensors are used for the detection of fire. These sensors had some limitations like time and they cannot cover a wide range of area. To overcome above limitations un-manned aerial vehicle (UAV) is proposed for detecting forest fires. The un-manned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) will keep the forest under surveillance through auto piloting and transmits real-time video to the base station using wireless communication.