FIRE-RES Geo-Catch: a mobile application to support reliable fuel mapping at a pan-European scale

Abstract

We present a browser-based App for smartphones that is freely available to end-users for collecting geotagged and oriented photos depicting vegetation biomass and fuel characteristics. Our solution builds on advantages of smartphones, allowing their use as easy sensors to collect data by imaging forest ecosystems. The strength and innovation of the proposed solution is based on the following points: (i) using a low memory footprint App, streaming images and data with as little data-volume and memory as needed; (ii) using JavaScript APIs that can be launched from both a browser or as an installed App, as it applies features such as service workers and Progressive Web App; (iii) storing both image and survey data (geolocation and sensor orientation) internally to the device on an indexed database, and synchronizing the data to a cloud-based server when the smartphone is online and when all other safety tests have been successfully passed. The goal is to achieve properly positioned and oriented photos that can be used as training and testing data for future estimation of the surface fuel types based on automatic segmentation and classification via Machine Learning and Deep Learning.