A Deep Learning Based Forest Fire Detection Approach Using UAV and YOLOv3

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being used in forest fire monitoring and detection thanks to their high mobility and ability to cover areas at different altitudes and locations with relatively lower cost. Traditional fire detection algorithms are mostly based on the RGB color model, but their speed and accuracy need further improvements. This paper proposes a forest fire detection algorithm by exploiting YOLOv3 to UAV-based aerial images. Firstly, a UAV platform for the purpose of forest fire detection is developed. Then according to the available computation power of the onboard hardware, a small-scale of convolution neural network (CNN) is implemented with the help of YOLOv3. The testing results show that the recognition rate of this algorithm is about 83%, and the frame rate of detection can reach more than 3.2 fps. This method has great advantages for real-time forest fire detection application using UAVs.