A review of machine learning applications in wildfire science and management

Artificial intelligence has been applied in wildfire science and management since the 1990s, with early applications including neural networks and expert systems. Since then the field has rapidly progressed congruently with the wide adoption of machine learning (ML) in the environmental sciences. Here, we present a scoping review of ML in wildfire science and management. Our objective is to improve awareness of ML among wildfire scientists and managers, as well as illustrate the challenging range of problems in wildfire science available to data scientists. We first present an overview of popular ML approaches used in wildfire science to date, and then review their use in wildfire science within six problem domains: 1) fuels characterization, fire detection, and mapping; 2) fire weather and climate change; 3) fire occurrence, susceptibility, and risk; 4) fire behavior prediction; 5) fire effects; and 6) fire management. We also discuss the advantages and limitations of various ML approaches and identify opportunities for future advances in wildfire science and management within a data science context. We identified 298 relevant publications, where the most frequently used ML methods included random forests, MaxEnt, artificial neural networks, decision trees, support vector machines, and genetic algorithms. There exists opportunities to apply more current ML methods (e.g., deep learning and agent based learning) in wildfire science. However, despite the ability of ML models to learn on their own, expertise in wildfire science is necessary to ensure realistic modelling of fire processes across multiple scales, while the complexity of some ML methods requires sophisticated knowledge for their application. Finally, we stress that the wildfire research and management community plays an active role in providing relevant, high quality data for use by practitioners of ML methods.Comment: 83 pages, 4 figures, 3 table

Project RISE: Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions

Industrial smoke emissions pose a significant concern to human health. Prior works have shown that using Computer Vision (CV) techniques to identify smoke as visual evidence can influence the attitude of regulators and empower citizens to pursue environmental justice. However, existing datasets are not of sufficient quality nor quantity to train the robust CV models needed to support air quality advocacy. We introduce RISE, the first large-scale video dataset for Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions. We adopted a citizen science approach to collaborate with local community members to annotate whether a video clip has smoke emissions. Our dataset contains 12,567 clips from 19 distinct views from cameras that monitored three industrial facilities. These daytime clips span 30 days over two years, including all four seasons. We ran experiments using deep neural networks to establish a strong performance baseline and reveal smoke recognition challenges. Our survey study discussed community feedback, and our data analysis displayed opportunities for integrating citizen scientists and crowd workers into the application of Artificial Intelligence for social good.Comment: Technical repor

АЛГОРИТМ АНАЛИЗА ДИНАМИЧЕСКИХ ТЕКСТУР

Recognizing dynamic patterns based on visual processing is significant for many applications such as remote monitoring for the prevention of natural disasters, e.g. forest fires, various types of surveillance, e.g. traffic monitoring, background subtraction in challenging environments, e.g. outdoor scenes with vegetation, homeland security applications and scientific studies of animal behavior. In the context of surveillance, recognizing dynamic patterns is of significance to isolate activities of interest (e.g. fire) from distracting background (e.g. windblown vegetation and changes in scene illumination).Methods: pattern recognition, computer vision.Results: This paper presents video based image processing algorithm with samples usually containing a cluttered background. According to the spatiotemporal features, four categorized groups were formulated. Dynamic texture recognition algorithm refers image objects to one of this group. Motion, color, facial, energy Laws and ELBP features are extracted for dynamic texture categorization. Classification based on boosted random forest.Practical relevance: Experimental results show that the proposed method is feasible and effective for video-based dynamic texture categorization. Averaged classification accuracy on the all video images is 95.2%.Постановка проблемы: Обнаружение динамических текстур на видеоизображениях в настоящее время находит все более широкое применение в системах компьютерного зрения. Например, обнаружение дыма и пламени в системах экологического мониторинга, анализ автомобильного трафика при мониторинге загруженности дорог, и в других системах. Поиск объекта интереса на динамическом фоне часто бывает затруднен за счет похожих текстурных признаков или признаков движения у фона и искомого объекта. В связи с этим возникает необходимость разработки алгоритма классификации динамических текстур для выделения объектов интереса на динамическом фоне.Методы: распознавание образов, компьютерное зрение.Результаты: В данной работе рассматривается обработка видеоизображений содержащих объекты с динамическим поведением на динамическом фоне, такие как вода, туман, пламя, текстиль на ветру и др. Разработан алгоритм отнесения объектов видеоизображения к одной из четырех предлагаемых категорий. Извлекаются признаки движения, цветовые особенности, фрактальности, энергетические признаки Ласа, строятся ELBP-гистограммы. В качестве классификатора использован бустинговый случайный лес.Практическая значимость: Разработан метод, позволяющий разделить динамические текстур на категории: по типу движения (периодическое и хаотичное) и типу объектов интереса (природные и искусственные). Экспериментальные исследования подтверждают эффективность предложенного алгоритма для отнесения объектов изображения к той или иной категории. Средняя точность классификации составила 95.2%

Verification of Smoke Detection in Video Sequences Based on Spatio-temporal Local Binary Patterns

AbstractThe early smoke detection in outdoor scenes using video sequences is one of the crucial tasks of modern surveillance systems. Real scenes may include objects that are similar to smoke with dynamic behavior due to low resolution cameras, blurring, or weather conditions. Therefore, verification of smoke detection is a necessary stage in such systems. Verification confirms the true smoke regions, when the regions similar to smoke are already detected in a video sequence. The contributions are two-fold. First, many types of Local Binary Patterns (LBPs) in 2D and 3D variants were investigated during experiments according to changing properties of smoke during fire gain. Second, map of brightness differences, edge map, and Laplacian map were studied in Spatio-Temporal LBP (STLBP) specification. The descriptors are based on histograms, and a classification into three classes such as dense smoke, transparent smoke, and non-smoke was implemented using Kullback-Leibler divergence. The recognition results achieved 96–99% and 86–94% of accuracy for dense smoke in dependence of various types of LPBs and shooting artifacts including noise

Multi-teacher knowledge distillation as an effective method for compressing ensembles of neural networks

Deep learning has contributed greatly to many successes in artificial intelligence in recent years. Today, it is possible to train models that have thousands of layers and hundreds of billions of parameters. Large-scale deep models have achieved great success, but the enormous computational complexity and gigantic storage requirements make it extremely difficult to implement them in real-time applications. On the other hand, the size of the dataset is still a real problem in many domains. Data are often missing, too expensive, or impossible to obtain for other reasons. Ensemble learning is partially a solution to the problem of small datasets and overfitting. However, ensemble learning in its basic version is associated with a linear increase in computational complexity. We analyzed the impact of the ensemble decision-fusion mechanism and checked various methods of sharing the decisions including voting algorithms. We used the modified knowledge distillation framework as a decision-fusion mechanism which allows in addition compressing of the entire ensemble model into a weight space of a single model. We showed that knowledge distillation can aggregate knowledge from multiple teachers in only one student model and, with the same computational complexity, obtain a better-performing model compared to a model trained in the standard manner. We have developed our own method for mimicking the responses of all teachers at the same time, simultaneously. We tested these solutions on several benchmark datasets. In the end, we presented a wide application use of the efficient multi-teacher knowledge distillation framework. In the first example, we used knowledge distillation to develop models that could automate corrosion detection on aircraft fuselage. The second example describes detection of smoke on observation cameras in order to counteract wildfires in forests.Comment: Doctoral dissertation in the field of computer science, machine learning. Application of knowledge distillation as aggregation of ensemble models. Along with several uses. 140 pages, 67 figures, 13 table

Horizontal Review on Video Surveillance for Smart Cities: Edge Devices, Applications, Datasets, and Future Trends

The automation strategy of today’s smart cities relies on large IoT (internet of Things) systems that collect big data analytics to gain insights. Although there have been recent reviews in this field, there is a remarkable gap that addresses four sides of the problem. Namely, the application of video surveillance in smart cities, algorithms, datasets, and embedded systems. In this paper, we discuss the latest datasets used, the algorithms used, and the recent advances in embedded systems to form edge vision computing are introduced. Moreover, future trends and challenges are addressed

Trends in European Climate Change Perception: Where the Effects of Climate Change go unnoticed

Climate change threatens global impacts in a variety of domains that must be limited by adaptation and mitigation measures. The successful implementation of such policies can strongly benefit from the general public’s cooperation motivated by their own risk perceptions. Public participation can be promoted by tailoring policies to the populations they affect, which in turn results in the need for a deeper understanding of how different communities interact with the issue of climate change. Social media platforms such as the microblogging service Twitter have opened unprecedented opportunities for research on public perception in recent years, offering a continuous stream of user-generated data. Simultaneously, they represent a crucial discursive space in which members of the public develop and discuss their opinions and concerns about climate change. Subsequently, this thesis gains insight into the characteristics of public reactions to individual climate change effects and processes by investing corresponding corpora of tweets spanning a decade. For seven western European countries, the spatial, temporal, and thematic reaction patterns are determined with a further assessment of the drivers behind each finding. Tweets are collected, classified, georeferenced, and clustered using a selection of Geographic Information Retrieval as well as Natural Language Processing methods before being analysed regarding thematic trends in their content, spatial distributions and influences of environmental factors, as well temporal distributions and impacts of real-world events. The findings illustrate diverse climate change perceptions that vary across spatial, temporal, and thematic dimensions. Communities tend to focus more on issues relevant to their local or national environment, leading populations to develop a certain degree of specialisation for these aspects of climate change. This typically coincides with a substantially more domestic discourse on the subject and a decrease in interest for corresponding international events. In a similar sense, the tangibility of an event drives the magnitude of reactions. However, while more tangible events are more frequently recognised and discussed, less tangible events tend to be more frequently attributed to climate change as the public shifts their focus from immediate impacts on the personal scale to impacts on the global scale. Additionally, traditional news media are shown to retain a high level of control over science communication and the climate change discourse on Twitter, likely influencing the public’s perspective on global warming. Individual real-world events such as major climate conferences and scientific releases only occasionally elicit strong public reactions when they are topically related to an event type, whereas global protests can lead to significant discussion across various event types. Inversely, global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic significantly reduce public concern about climate change processes