Accurate Detection of Occluded Wildfire Boundary

Inaccurate localization of wildfire boundary will adversely affect the efficiency of fire fighting, especially in the case of limited water for aerial dumping. This paper formulates the detection of occluded wildfire boundary as a shape completion problem and introduces a new solution. Different from traditional shape completion algorithms which only consider the contour geometry, the proposed algorithm takes partially visible fire surface geometry into consideration, and generates extrapolated feature points to detect the invisible section. The proposed solution involves two processes: firstly, fire surfaces above the occluded segments are extrapolated to the ground level with a Hurwitz–Radon operator based algorithm to obtain feature points in the invisible segments of the wildfire boundary; secondly, interpolating extra control points with a Bezier curve to reduce uncertainty and improve the accuracy of fire boundary detection. To demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm, a series of numerical simulations were performed. Simulated results show that the proposed algorithm in this study can detect the occluded wildfire boundary that conforms with the ground truth of the invisible fire boundary.