A Survey on Forest Fire Monitoring Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Every year, forest fire causes heavy death toll and destruction around the world. The number of forest fires is increasing each year along with the damages associated with it. At this point, traditional forest fire detection methods such as point sensors, thermal sensors, watch tower, human patrol and satellite imagery are not being enough to provide early detection and continuous monitoring. Recent developments in electronics and control systems have made unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) more readily available and created an opportunity to utilize them for continuous forest monitoring with higher flexibility, maneuverability and precision. Early level experiments show that the limitations of the previous methods could be overcome by UAV-facilitated forest fire monitoring strategies. This paper highlights the basic idea of UAV-based forest fire monitoring and relevant researches and operations that have been conducted in this field thus far. The future of forest fire monitoring relies more on the use of UAVs and their onboard mission payloads, and the main motivation of this paper is to help for identifying the methodologies behind the existing systems and to find new methods of improving the UAV systems to fight this dreadful calamity.