A cooperative perception system for multiple UAVs: Application to automatic detection of forest fires

TLDR

The study presents a cooperative perception system enabling multiple heterogeneous UAVs to automatically detect and localize forest fires. The system integrates infrared and visual cameras, fire detectors, low‑level image‑processing functions (segmentation, stabilization, geo‑referencing), and cooperative data‑fusion algorithms across UAVs. Field experiments demonstrate that the cooperative UAV system can autonomously detect, monitor, and measure forest fires. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a cooperative perception system for multiple heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It considers different kind of sensors: infrared and visual cameras and fire detectors. The system is based on a set of multipurpose low‐level image‐processing functions including segmentation, stabilization of sequences of images, and geo‐referencing, and it also involves data fusion algorithms for cooperative perception. It has been tested in field experiments that pursued autonomous multi‐UAV cooperative detection, monitoring, and measurement of forest fires. This paper presents the overall architecture of the perception system, describes some of the implemented cooperative perception techniques, and shows experimental results on automatic forest fire detection and localization with cooperating UAVs. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.