Particle Filter Based Mosaicking For Tracking Forest Fires

Using miniature air vehicles (MAVs) is a cost effective, simple method for collecting data about the size, shape, and location characteristics of a forest fire. However, noise in measurements used to compute pose (location and attitude) of the camera on board the MAV leads to significant errors in the processing of collected video data. Typical methods using MAVs to track fires attempt to find single geolocation estimates and filter that estimate with subsequent observations. While this is an effective method of resolving the noise to achieve a better geolocation estimate, it reduces a fire to a single point or set of points. A georeferenced mosaic is a more effective method for presenting information about a fire to fire fighters. It provides a means of presenting size, shape, and geolocation information simultaneously. We describe a novel technique to account for noise in pose estimation of the camera by converting it to the image domain. We also introduce a new concept, a Georeferenced Uncertainty Mosaic (GUM), in which we utilize a Sequential Monte Carlo method (a particle filter) to resolve the noise in the image domain and construct a georeferenced mosaic that simultaneously shows size, shape, geolocation, and uncertainty information about the fire.