A Review on Forest Fire Detection Techniques: A Decadal Perspective

Forest fire disasters have always been mankind’s constant and inconvenient companion since time immemorial. In the recent past years, managing crisis for example a large scale fire has become a very difficult and challenging task. Things that are common in most of the forest fire that occur at large scale are loss of life (human or animal), loss of vegetation, loss of flora and fauna, and communication failure (if any). Apart from causing a great loss to valuable natural resources of nature forest fire pose a greater risk not only to life of human being but also to the inhabitant’s such as wild life living in the forest. As per National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS), if a fire is detected within 6 minutes of its occurrence then it can be easily disposed-off before it turns into a large scale fire. For this a network that can detect fire at a very early stage is required. There are numerous techniques to detect the occurrence of forest fire and this article is dedicated towards reviewing detection techniques present in the literature. This work will give a bird’s eye view of the technologies used in automatic detection of forest fires and reviews almost all the detection techniques available in the literature. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time that almost all the techniques available in the literature are reviewed and considering almost all the parameters.