[Research] Special Auton Lab meeting: This Friday Dec 1st at Noon in NSH 3305

[Artur Dubrawski]

Speaker:

Vlad Ermakov

Title:

Firefighters from Outer Space: Game With a Purpose Approach for
Improving Sensing of Forest Fires

Abstract:

Remote sensing is an integral part of forest fire monitoring
services around the world. Most widely accepted approach relies on the
MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) sensors, mounted
on NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites. These sensors can measure
reflected light and emitted heat from any location on Earth multiple
times a day, but have poor resolution. Collecting ground truth to
evaluate performance of various detection algorithms has been a
challenging and a costly task. This talk presents a scalable approach
to it. A recently launched game-with-a-purpose "Firefighters from Outer
Space" is a limited beta, but it has already attracted many users and a
lot of interest from remote sensing community in Russia, receiving the
first place award in "Monitoring Forest Fires" competition. We were
able to use the data gathered using this human computation based
approach to measure detection accuracy, and evaluate several techniques
that can hopefully lead to faster detection and response, and more
accurate statistics about forest fires.