Fire Frontline Monitoring by Enabling UAV-Based Virtual Reality with Adaptive Imaging Rate

Shafkat Islam, Qiyuan Huang, Fatemeh Afghah, Peter Fule, Abolfazl Razi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

26 Scopus citations

Abstract

Recently, using drones for forest fire management has gained a lot of attention from the research community due to their advantages such as low operation and deployment cost, flexible mobility, and high-quality imaging. It also minimizes human intervention, especially in hard-to-reach areas where the use of ground-based infrastructure is troublesome. Drones can provide virtual reality to firefighters by collecting on-demand high-resolution images with adjustable zoom, focus, and perspective to improve fire control and eliminate human hazards. In this paper, we propose a novel model for fire expansion as well as a distributed algorithm for drones to relocate themselves towards the front-line of an expanding fire field. The proposed algorithm comprises a light-weight image processing for fire edge detection that is highly desirable over computational expensive deep learning methods for resource-constrained drones. The positioning algorithm includes motions tangential and normal to fire frontline to follow the fire expansion while keeping minimum pairwise distances for collision avoidance and non-overlapping imaging. We proposed an action-reward mechanism to adjust the drones' speed and processing rate based on the fire expansion rate and the available onboard processing power. Simulations results are provided to support the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationConference Record - 53rd Asilomar Conference on Circuits, Systems and Computers, ACSSC 2019
EditorsMichael B. Matthews
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages368-372
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781728143002
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 2019
Event53rd Asilomar Conference on Circuits, Systems and Computers, ACSSC 2019 - Pacific Grove, United States
Duration: Nov 3 2019Nov 6 2019

Publication series

NameConference Record - Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers
Volume2019-November
ISSN (Print)1058-6393

Conference

Conference53rd Asilomar Conference on Circuits, Systems and Computers, ACSSC 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPacific Grove
Period11/3/1911/6/19

Keywords

  • UAV networks
  • autonomous control
  • fire monitoring
  • image-based edge detection
  • virtual reality

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Signal Processing
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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