An Agent-Based Approach for Regional Forest Fire Detection Using MODIS Data: A Preliminary Study in Iran

Detecting fires, which are at their early stages is the first component of effective fire fighting. To date, several algorithms have been proposed to detect fire spots using remote sensing data. Nevertheless, in order to be able to accurately detect small and cool fires, which are very important at the regional scale, most of these algorithms need to be adjusted and improved. In this paper, an agent-based algorithm is presented for regional forest fire detection using bi-temporal MODIS data. The algorithm is designed to be so self-adaptive and consistent that it could be applied to the different pairs of consecutive images taken by the same satellite platform and at the same daytime. The results clearly show that compared with the MODIS contextual algorithm (version 4), the proposed method is more sensitive to small and cool forest fires in Iran.