arXiv AI

FLAME 3 Dataset: Unleashing the Power of Radiometric Thermal UAV Imagery for Wildfire Management

arXiv:2412. 02831v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The increasing accessibility of radiometric thermal imaging sensors for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offers significant potential for advancing AI-driven aerial wildfire management.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

Multimodal RGB-Infrared Combination for UAV-Based Wildfire Segmentation: A Comparative Study on FLAME3

The paper examines RGB‑infrared fusion for binary wildfire segmentation using UAV imagery on the FLAME3 dataset. It compares RGB and infrared baselines with three fusion strategies across U‑Net, DeepLabV3+, and SegFormer architectures. Results show thermal data dominates segmentation performance, and feature‑level fusion with transformer‑based models yields the best results.

By Matheus F. Kovaleski, Lu\'is Garrote, Cristiano Premebida, J\'er\^ome Mendes, Jo\~ao Ruivo Paulo
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

A Sentinel-2 benchmark dataset for deep-learning active-fire segmentation across 25 California wildfires

The article introduces an open image dataset for active‑fire segmentation in satellite imagery, comprising 2,148 image‑mask pairs from 25 California wildfires captured between July 2020 and August 2026. Each 512×512 pixel, three‑channel image is a Sentinel‑2 Level‑2A composite of bands B12, B11, and B8A, with a fixed linear rendering applied uniformly. Masks distinguish background, short‑wave‑infrared rule‑based active fire, and invalid observations, and the dataset includes chip‑level metadata, an incident‑disjoint split, and a mask‑blind analyst review of 233 test chips.

By Shreyan Mitra, Mohammadreza Narimani, Parastoo Farajpoor
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

Scale-based Approach for Active Wildfire Segmentation on Satellite Imagery

The paper proposes a data-driven protocol that uses multispectral Landsat‑8 imagery and connected‑component analysis to characterize fire‑region size distributions for active wildfire segmentation. Three segmentation architectures—U‑Net, DeepLabV3+, and SegFormer—are evaluated under different SWIR‑based spectral configurations, with U‑Net showing the strongest robustness and SWIR2 consistently delivering the best results. The study highlights the importance of both spectral band selection and architectural design for robust satellite‑based active wildfire mapping, especially when training on low fire‑pixel density images.

By Matheus F. Kovaleski, Cristiano Premebida, Jo\~ao Ruivo Paulo
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

UAV Thermal Imagery for Inert Ordnance Screening: Multi Campaign Dataset Development,Object Detection, and Practical Recommendations

The paper presents a multi‑campaign UAV thermal image dataset for inert ordnance screening, comprising 5,855 labeled image pairs collected in Tennessee across diverse terrains and seasons. The authors trained YOLOV11l and RT‑DETR‑R50 models on 33 m and 15 m altitude data, achieving automated candidate detection, and provided practical guidelines for future humanitarian mine action surveys. The dataset and models aim to aid screening and prioritization for follow‑up technical surveys or EOD assessment, not to replace clearance operations.

By Chad Melton, PhD., Annabelle Kelton
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Real-time physics inversion for retrieval of sub-pixel wildfire temperatures from VSWIR imaging spectroscopy

arXiv:2608. 07580v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we present a wildfire temperature retrieval framework for VSWIR imaging spectroscopy data, employed on data from NASA's Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS-3).

By William R. Keely, Philip G. Brodrick, Katherine Mistick, Adam Chlus, Robert O. Green, Philip E. Dennison
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Training with synthetic data for drone detection in thermal imagery

The paper explores a synthetic-first training approach for detecting drones in medium- and long-wave infrared imagery, combining synthetic scene generation with fine-tuning on real data. It demonstrates that synthetic data can establish initial object representations, but real infrared data is crucial to close domain gaps and improve reliability. The study finds that aligning datasets has a greater impact on performance than increasing model size, and that semantic alignment in feature space is the strongest predictor of success, with radiometric factors like entropy and dynamic range also contributing.

By Tanel Liiv, Sander Soodla, Nzamba Bignoumba, Alma M. Liezenga, Toomas Pruuden
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

RGB-to-IR image translation for infrared vehicle detection in unseen UAV domains

The paper explores using generative models to translate RGB UAV images into synthetic infrared (IR) images for training vehicle detectors in domains where real IR data is scarce. Various translators—supervised GANs, ControlNet-based diffusion models, and LoRA-ed foundation models—were trained on paired RGB-IR datasets and applied to unseen target datasets to generate synthetic IR data. The synthetic IR images, especially those produced by Stable Diffusion 3.5 with ControlNet, significantly improved detection performance on unseen IR test sets, outperforming RGB and grayscale baselines and narrowing the gap to real IR data.

By Thijs A. Eker, Ella P. Fokkinga, Jan Erik van Woerden, Elfi I. S. Hofmeijer, Sebastiaan P. Snel, Klamer Schutte, Friso G. Heslinga