Using artificial intelligence for bushfire detection, management

Two years later, the country could be facing another dangerous fire season. However, a University of South Australia PhD candidate, Liang Zhao, has devised a way to use satellites orbiting above Australia to detect very small fires before they become problematic. Zhao is collecting smoke imagery from multiple satellites and then designing and training artificial intelligence (AI) models to recognise small outbreaks, to prevent a repeat of the 2020 summer. Zhao's algorithm will use satellites to improve fire detection, even from 30,000 kilometres away. "The problem with satellites is that those with high spatial resolution, focusing on small areas, tend to have low temporal resolution, taking much longer to capture images for the same location," Zhao said.