• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_1
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• pp.1413-1425
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• 2023

The increasing frequency of wildfires due to climate change is causing extreme loss of life and property. They cause loss of vegetation and affect ecosystem changes depending on their intensity and occurrence. Ecosystem changes, in turn, affect wildfire occurrence, causing secondary damage. Thus, accurate estimation of the areas affected by wildfires is fundamental. Satellite remote sensing is used for forest fire detection because it can rapidly acquire topographic and meteorological information about the affected area after forest fires. In addition, deep learning algorithms such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) and transformer models show high performance for more accurate monitoring of fire-burnt regions. To date, the application of deep learning models has been limited, and there is a scarcity of reports providing quantitative performance evaluations for practical field utilization. Hence, this study emphasizes a comparative analysis, exploring performance enhancements achieved through both model selection and data design. This study examined deep learning models for detecting wildfire-damaged areas using Landsat 8 satellite images in California. Also, we conducted a comprehensive comparison and analysis of the detection performance of multiple models, such as U-Net and High-Resolution Network-Object Contextual Representation (HRNet-OCR). Wildfire-related spectral indices such as normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and normalized burn ratio (NBR) were used as input channels for the deep learning models to reflect the degree of vegetation cover and surface moisture content. As a result, the mean intersection over union (mIoU) was 0.831 for U-Net and 0.848 for HRNet-OCR, showing high segmentation performance. The inclusion of spectral indices alongside the base wavelength bands resulted in increased metric values for all combinations, affirming that the augmentation of input data with spectral indices contributes to the refinement of pixels. This study can be applied to other satellite images to build a recovery strategy for fire-burnt areas.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Environmental Restoration Technology
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.71-77
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• 2003

Forest fires happened simultaneously in Go-Seong, Gang-Neung, Sam-Cheok, Dong-Hae, Ul-Chin for 9 days(7th-15th of April, 2000). The area of those fires came to 23,794ha, about 80 times of Yeoui-Do and the extent of damage was the biggest and worst in Korea. The focus of this study is to compare the rate of restoration by damage types and develop the sound restoration model and efficient woodland management after the forest fire. The study site faces East Sea and the elements such as seasons, topographical features and etc. make difficult to obtain the suitable data from satellite. This study analyzed two images;2000yr and 2001yr after the fire. MODVI was more useful to grasp the damage than NDVI and the limitation of this study was the lack of images by damage types. The study suggests that lots of images are needed to monitor and analyze the forest fire site and the image of higher resolution is required to analyze the narrow site.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.5_3
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• pp.1373-1387
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• 2021

Forest fire poses a significant threat to the environment and society, affecting carbon cycle and surface energy balance, and resulting in socioeconomic losses. Widely used multi-spectral satellite image-based approaches for burned area detection have a problem in that they do not work under cloudy conditions. Therefore, in this study, Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from Europe Space Agency, which can be collected in all weather conditions, were used to identify forest fire damaged area based on a series of processes including Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and K-means clustering. Four forest fire cases, which occurred in Gangneung·Donghae and Goseong·Sokcho in Gangwon-do of South Korea and two areas in North Korea on April 4, 2019, were examined. The estimated burned areas were evaluated using fire reference data provided by the National Institute of Forest Science (NIFOS) for two forest fire cases in South Korea, and differenced normalized burn ratio (dNBR) for all four cases. The average accuracy using the NIFOS reference data was 86% for the Gangneung·Donghae and Goseong·Sokcho fires. Evaluation using dNBR showed an average accuracy of 84% for all four forest fire cases. It was also confirmed that the stronger the burned intensity, the higher detection the accuracy, and vice versa. Given the advantage of SAR remote sensing, the proposed statistical processing and K-means clustering-based approach can be used to quickly identify forest fire damaged area across the Korean Peninsula, where a cloud cover rate is high and small-scale forest fires frequently occur.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.43 no.6
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• pp.883-896
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• 2023

As human activities in Korea are spread throughout the mountains, forest fires often affect residential areas, infrastructure, and other facilities. Hence, it is necessary to detect fire-damaged areas quickly to enable support and recovery. Remote sensing is the most efficient tool for this purpose. Fire damage detection experiments were conducted on the east coast of Korea. Because this area comprises a mixture of forest and artificial land cover, data with low resolution are not suitable. We used Sentinel-2 multispectral instrument (MSI) data, which provide adequate temporal and spatial resolution, and the k-nearest neighbor (kNN) algorithm in this study. Six bands of Sentinel-2 MSI and two indices of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and normalized burn ratio (NBR) were used as features for kNN classification. The kNN classifier was trained using 2,000 randomly selected samples in the fire-damaged and undamaged areas. Outliers were removed and a forest type map was used to improve classification performance. Numerous experiments for various neighbors for kNN and feature combinations have been conducted using bi-temporal and uni-temporal approaches. The bi-temporal classification performed better than the uni-temporal classification. However, the uni-temporal classification was able to detect severely damaged areas.