Fireline Analyzer — System capabilities

What the system does, how, and why it fits

Overview

Turning drone thermal into containment decisions

Fireline Analyzer reads thermal imagery from drone overflights, finds the fire fronts most likely to break the line, puts them on a live map with wind and terrain, and forecasts where they could move next.

Follow the pipeline in the chart above — each step is a slide. Jump to any of them, or scroll through in order.

Detection

01

Breakout-risk hotspot scoring

It finds the active-fire hotspots that most threaten the containment line — not just the hottest pixels, but the fronts most likely to escape.

How it works

The DJI Thermal SDK converts each thermal frame to a per-pixel temperature map. A scene-adaptive segmentation, anchored to the frame's own ambient, splits pixels into unburned, burned, and active fire. Each hotspot is scored intensity × area × unburned-fuel adjacency × proximity to the line — deterministic, no black box.

Why it fitsThe real question is where fire might cross the line, not where the heat is. Weighting hotspots by how much of their edge touches unburned fuel near the line surfaces exactly the encroaching fronts crews act on — and a transparent score is defensible where a black-box number is not.

Location

02

Geolocating every detection

Each hotspot is placed at real ground coordinates — with the method, and therefore the confidence, made explicit.

How it works

Three tiers, best first: projected (per-pixel from the camera model, GPS, altitude, gimbal), center (oblique frames placed at the image-center ground point), and a drone-GPS frame fallback — each point tagged with how it was derived. A jurisdiction-agnostic guard rejects any frame whose GPS is a far outlier (>50 km) from the rest of its own mission.

Why it fitsA score is only actionable at a coordinate. Tiering and tagging keeps positional uncertainty honest, and the outlier guard tolerates mutual-aid deployments anywhere while catching bad GPS fixes that would scatter detections hundreds of miles away.

Common operating picture

03

The interactive fire map

One shared map: the containment line, risk markers, and high-resolution aerial imagery over a choice of basemaps.

How it works

Built on Mapbox GL. Analysts draw and edit the containment line; risk markers are colored by severity and filterable (all / mid+high / high only); uploaded orthomosaics are streamed as map overlays; basemaps switch between satellite, topographic, and street.

Why it fitsContainment is spatial. Seeing hotspots relative to the line, over real terrain and imagery, is the core of line planning — and the severity filter cuts hundreds of detections down to the handful that matter.

Atmosphere

04

Live wind field

An animated wind overlay shows current speed and direction across the fire area at a glance.

How it works

Current 10 m wind from the National Weather Service is rendered as a flowing, speed-colored particle field — the same style of wind map crews already read.

Why it fitsAfter fuel, wind is the dominant driver of spread, direction, and spotting. A live wind picture over the same map as the hotspots is baseline situational awareness — and it's the same wind that drives the spread forecast, so what crews see matches what the model uses.

Imagery

05

Georeferenced ortho imagery

High-resolution orthomosaics stitched from the flight, draped on the map so crews see the burn area exactly as it looks right now.

How it works

Uploaded orthomosaics are processed into georeferenced cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs on S3 and streamed to the map as tiled overlays via windowed range reads, so only the on-screen area loads. Overlay opacity is adjustable, and the imagery lines up with the containment line, hotspots, and wind on the same map.

Why it fitsA current, high-resolution aerial — captured on the same flight as the thermal — is ground truth a generic satellite basemap can't give: real-time fuel, structures, access routes, and how the fire actually sits on the landscape.

Prediction

06

Fire-spread forecasting

From the detected hotspots, a short-horizon forecast of where fire could travel — time-stepped isochrones from 15 minutes to 3 hours.

How it works

It pulls LANDFIRE surface fuel plus slope and aspect for the fire's neighborhood, combines them with live wind and a fuel-moisture scenario, and computes a Rothermel rate of spread. Fire is seeded at the hotspots and advanced with elliptical propagation; arrival times contour into nested isochrones. All horizons compute once and cache, so the time slider is instant.

Why it fitsRothermel is the surface-fire model behind BehavePlus and FARSITE — the lineage the fire community trusts. Grounding it in real fuel, terrain, and wind gives a defensible, directional read on near-term movement. It is short-horizon decision support, not a validated perimeter.

Backbone

07

Data & compute that hold up in the field

The infrastructure that keeps all of the above fast, reliable, and cheap to run.

How it works

Fuel and terrain come from LANDFIRE, auto-falling-back through data vintages so any covered region resolves. Each agency's region is clipped once and read window-by-window instead of loaded whole; the heavy spread compute runs in a separate process so the app never stalls; results are cached.

Why it fitsFire programs run on lean budgets and modest hardware over field connections. Reading only the window a fire needs, computing off the request path, and caching aggressively keeps the tool responsive — and a new agency comes online by clipping its area once, with no per-incident setup.

Governance

08

Multi-agency isolation, security & audit

Multiple agencies share the platform without sharing data, under role-based access and an audit trail.

How it works

Every mission, image, detection, and forecast is scoped to its agency; roles gate who can edit versus view; sessions time out on inactivity with a clean re-login; and privileged changes are recorded to an audit log.

Why it fitsWildfire is inter-agency by nature — mutual aid, cooperators, and overlapping jurisdictions. Strict data separation with a defensible record of who changed what is exactly what shared-but-accountable operations require.

Honest scope

What it is — and what it is not

Credibility with fire professionals depends on being clear about limits.

  • The spread forecast is short-horizon and directional — a surface-fire model under uniform wind. It is not a validated perimeter forecast and does not model multi-day growth, spotting, or crown fire.
  • Fuel and weather are US-based (LANDFIRE + National Weather Service).
  • Detections carry a geolocation-confidence tag; oblique-frame positions are approximate.
  • The risk score is deliberately deterministic and explainable — a design choice for a safety tool.
In shortUsed within that scope — locating encroaching heat, watching wind, and getting a defensible directional read on near-term spread — it compresses a slow, manual thermal-review-and-mapping task into a live operating picture.
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