Improvement in detection of small wildfires

Detecting and imaging small wildfires with an Airborne Scanner is done against generally high background levels. The Airborne Scanner System used is a two-channel thermal IR scanner, with one channel selected for imaging the terrain and the other channel sensitive to hotter targets. If a relationship can be determined between the two channels that quantifies the background signal for hotter targets, then an algorithm can be determined that removes the background signal in that channel leaving only the fire signal. The relationship can be determined anywhere between various points in the signal processing of the radiometric data from the radiometric input to the quantized output of the system. As long as only linear operations are performed on the signal, the relationship will only depend on the system gain and offsets within the range of interest. The algorithm can be implemented either by using a look-up table or performing the calculation in the system computer. The current presentation will describe the algorithm, its derivation, and its implementation in the Firefly Wildfire Detection System by means of an off-the-shelf commercial scanner. Improvement over the previous algorithm used and the margin gained for improving the imaging of the terrain will be demonstrated.