Awards for fire detection research

CRC research on mapping fires and vegetation has won several awards recently. The Fire surveillance and hazard mapping project, led by Prof Simon Jones and Dr Karin Reinke at RMIT University, took out the Victorian Spatial Excellence Award for Environment and Sustainability for their Fuels3D smartphone application. The app saves crucial hours by allowing land managers to rapidly collect imagery of vegetation for assessing how much fuel could be burnt in a bushfire or prescribed burn, and uses computer vision and photogrammetric techniques to calculate measures of fuel and severity metrics. The application is currently in beta mode and is being tested by CRC partners. As well as Prof Jones and Dr Reinke, the team includes Dr Luke Wallace, PhD student Sam Hillman and Masters student Christine Spits.

The project also won the best presentation award at the 38th Asian Conference of Remote Sensing recently in India, with Prof Jones giving the presentation on validating Himawari-8 for fire, based on research by CRC PhD student Bryan Hally.

Dr Karin Reinke accepting the Victorian Spatial Excellence Award.