Wildfire burned area detection using with Sentinel-2 and UNet

Air pollutants, such as large amounts of carbon dioxide produced by fire, are at risk of promoting global warming, causing more frequent and more wildfires all over the world. Large-scale wildfires cause air pollutants to spread, resulting in a significant increase in fine dust concentration. And human damage, property damage, and natural ecosystem damage are increasing. Rapid and accurate information of fire damaged the forest areas using high-resolution satellite imagery is effective in preparing wildfire prevention measures and monitoring burned areas. In this regard, the many research is underway to estimate fire burn damage using the difference spectral feature between healthy forests and burned forests. There are many spectral indices including well-known indices such as NDVI(Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) and NBR(Normalized Burn Ratio). It is possible to estimate burned area by computing a difference image representing a change in the spectral wavelength of the image between pre- and post-fire. In the case of South Korea, it is difficult to estimate wildfires because the spectral characteristics of vegetation vary from each season according to climate. And Compared to other countries, Forest fires are occurring small scale of forest fires less than 2,000ha. In our study, the accuracy was compared by applying various spectral indices to the estimation and evaluation of burned area in South Korea, using one of the deep learning models U-Net. As a result of the IoU value of 0.80 or more, it was confirmed that it was possible to calculate the forest fire damage site.

Acknowledgments:

This research was supported by a grant (2021-MOIS37-002) of "Intelligent Technology Development Program on Disaster Response and Emergency Management" funded by Ministry of Interior and Safety (MOIS, Korea).
This work was supported by the "Graduate school of Particulate matter specialization" of Korea Environmental Industry & Technology Institute grant funded by the Ministry of Environment, Republic of Korea.