Forward-Looking Infra-Red (FLIR) Enhancement System for Forest Fire Management

The Forward-Looking Infra-Red (FLIR) sensor is an extremely valuable tool for aerial supervisors in the fighting of forest and range fires. Due to expense and operational considerations, FLIRs have not yet been deployed widely for this task. When currently employed, the typical FLIR installation is such that the FLIR information is only immediately viewable by the crew of the host aircraft, and the FLIR interpretation and verbal information dissemination tasks add to the crew's work overload. This research proposes to develop an enhancement system to more fully utilize the rich information available in FLIR imagery and disseminate the information to other fire-fighting participants. The FLIR Enhancement System captures still pictures from the FLIR imagine stream and registers the image to geodetic coordinates, adjusting for the location and viewing perspective of the host aircraft. The system then extracts important fire intelligence like the fire boundary, hot spots, and retardant deposits, and disseminates this information in graphical form so that it can be viewed on Incident Map displays. This tool will enable firefighters to more effectively protect forests, grasslands, property, and human lives. The expected results include a system design from off-the-shelf components that can be operationally tested in Phase II.