UAV Forest Monitoring in Case of Fire: Robustifying Video Stitching by the Joint Use of Optical and Thermal Cameras

In this paper a new UAV video stitching method which is robust even in the presence of forest fire is proposed. The proposed method exploits in a complementary way both optical and thermal cameras. In particular, the visibility of the optical cameras in the presence of smoke is improved by exploiting the transparency of the thermal cameras to smoke. In addition, a new system based on the ECC image alignment algorithm that is capable in solving the video stabilization and stitching problems is proposed. Preliminary results obtained from the application of the proposed system in UAV captured videos are very promising.