Kalman Filter-Based Large-Scale Wildfire Monitoring With a System of UAVs

Wildfires play an important role in forest management, while an accurate assessment of current wildfire status is imperative for fire management. In this paper, a Kalman filter-based methodology is proposed to estimate the wildfire progress with online measurements that are collected by a system of unmanned aerial vehicles. The method is developed to estimate the wildfire propagation behavior as well as fire front contour. It is enabled by developing a scalar field wildfire model and utilizing the Kalman filter to estimate the parameters of the model. In addition, an uncertainty function is developed to describe the performance of the estimation results. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated in an independent fire simulation environment.

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