Computer vision techniques for fire monitoring using aerial images

The paper presents an approach to the use of aerial images for fire monitoring. It shows techniques to segment the fire on visual images and to geo-locate the fire front. Color processing is used for fire segmentation. To geo-locate the fire base, a planar surface is assumed. The homography between the image plane and the real plane can be computed from several points correspondences. This homography is later used to geo-locate the fire base. Several artificial landmarks are used to obtain an initial relation. The homography is updated as the camera moves by tracking several points over the sequence of images. The points are tracked by using a feature matching algorithm. The explained procedure has been applied to visual images of controlled field fires taken by a camera placed on a helicopter.