Through-Foliage Surface-Temperature Reconstruction for early Wildfire Detection

We introduce a novel method for reconstructing surface temperatures through occluding forest vegetation by combining signal processing and machine learning. Our goal is to enable fully automated aerial wildfire monitoring using autonomous drones, allowing for the early detection of ground fires before smoke or flames are visible. While synthetic aperture (SA) sensing mitigates occlusion from the canopy and sunlight, it introduces thermal blur that obscures the actual surface temperatures. To address this, we train a visual state space model to recover the subtle thermal signals of partially occluded soil and fire hotspots from this blurred data. A key challenge was the scarcity of real-world training data. We overcome this by integrating a latent diffusion model into a vector quantized to generated a large volume of realistic surface temperature simulations from real wildfire recordings, which we further expanded through temperature augmentation and procedural thermal forest simulation. On simulated data across varied ambient and surface temperatures, forest densities, and sunlight conditions, our method reduced the RMSE by a factor of 2 to 2.5 compared to conventional thermal and uncorrected SA imaging. In field experiments focused on high-temperature hotspots, the improvement was even more significant, with a 12.8-fold RMSE gain over conventional thermal and a 2.6-fold gain over uncorrected SA images. We also demonstrate our model's generalization to other thermal signals, such as human signatures for search and rescue. Since simple thresholding is frequently inadequate for detecting subtle thermal signals, the morphological characteristics are equally essential for accurate classification. Our experiments demonstrated another clear advantage: we reconstructed the complete morphology of fire and human signatures, whereas conventional imaging is defeated by partial occlusion.