An Extraction of Solar-contaminated Energy Part from MODIS Middle Infrared Channel Measurement to Detect Forest Fires

Wook Park, Sung Hwan Park, Hyung Sup Jung, Joong Sun Won

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this study, we have proposed an improved method to detect forest fires by correcting the reflected signals of day images using the middle-wavelength infrared (MWIR) channel. The proposed method is allowed to remove the reflected signals only using the image itself without an existing data source such as a land-cover map or atmospheric data. It includes the processing steps for calculating a solar-reflected signal such as 1) a simple correction model of the atmospheric transmittance for the MWIR channel and 2) calculating the image-based reflectance. We tested the performance of the method using the MODIS product. When compared to the conventional MODIS fire detection algorithm (MOD14 collection 6), the total number of detected fires was improved by approximately 17%. Most of all, the detection of fires improved by approximately 30% in the high reflection areas of the images. Moreover, the false alarm caused by artificial objects was clearly reduced and a confidence level analysis of the undetected fires showed that the proposed method had much better performance. The proposed method would be applicable to most satellite sensors with MWIR and thermal infrared channels. Especially for geostationary satellites such as GOES-R, HIMAWARI-8/9 and GeoKompsat-2A, the short acquisition time would greatly improve the performance of the proposed fire detection algorithm because reflected signals in the geostationary satellite images frequently vary according to solar zenith angle.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)39-55
Number of pages17
JournalKorean Journal of Remote Sensing
Volume35
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019

Keywords

  • MODIS
  • fire detection
  • middle-wavelength infrared (MWIR)
  • solar effects
  • thermal infrared (TIR)

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