Context Information for Understanding Forest Fire Using Evolutionary Computation

L. Usero3 , 4 , A. Arroyo2, and J. Calvo1

Dpto. de Organizaci on y Estructura de la informaci on, Universidad Polit ecnica de Madrid, Spain 2 Dpto. de Sistemas Inteligentes Aplicados Universidad Polit ecnica de Madrid, Spain 3 Dpto. Ciencias de la Computaci on Universidad de Alcal a, Spain Center for Spatial Technologies and Remote Sensing, U. California. One Shields Ave. 95616-8617 Davis, CA. USA aarroyo@eui.upm.es, luis.usero@uah.es, jcalvo@tdi.eui.upm.es
1

Abstract. One of the major forces for understanding forest re risk and behavior is the re fuel. Fire risk and behavior depend on the fuel properties such as moisture content. Context information on vegetation water content is vital for understanding the processes involved in initiation and propagation of forest res. In that sense, a novel method was tested to estimate vegetation canopy water content (CWC) from simulated MODIS satellite data. An inversion of a radiative transfer model called Forest Light Interaction-Model (FLIM) from performed using evolutionary computation. CWC is critical, among other applications, in wildre risk assessment since a decrease in CWC causes higher probability to have wildre occurrence. Simulations were carried out with the FLIM model for a wide range of forest canopy characteristics and CWC values. A 50 subsample of the simulations was used for the training process and 50 for the validation providing a RMSE=0.74 and r2=0.62. Further research is needed to apply this method on real MODIS images. Keywords: Genetic Programing, Vegetation Water Content, Forest Fire Understanding.

Introduction

Detecting the water content (Cw) is useful to monitor vegetation stress even forest re. Context information gathered by remote sensing is vital to understand the forest re risk and behavior. So it is signicant to use of remote sensing to measure spectral properties of leaves can provide an indirect structural canopy variables estimation in order to obtain a comprehensive spatial and temporal distribution. Vegetation canopy water content (CWC) is the weight of the water per leaf area unit and per ground area unit. CWC retrieval results critical for several environmental applications including wildre risk [2]. Fires front advances when
J. Mira and J.R. Alvarez (Eds.): IWINAC 2007, Part II, LNCS 4528, pp. 271276, 2007. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007

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the CWC is dried out. Empirical methods have been commonly applied to derive CWC from satellite data based on the response to changes in reectance in the near infrared and shortwave infrared part of the spectrum [7]. They work well for a specic location, but they need to be calibrated from site to site. Radiative transfer models model the response in reectance of the vegetation canopy, to account for a wide range of biophysical conditions [3]. Therefore, these models can be applied to derive CWC for dierent sites of diverse ecosystem conditions. The simplest radiative transfer models assume that the vegetation forms a continuous canopy of leaf layers. More sophisticated models consider the eect of the tree shadows in the reectance response, assuming trees are homogeneously distributed and equal in size. Further complete models take into account heterogeneous canopies with tree of dierent sizes and even understorey layer [6]. Simpler models make more assumptions, so they could be far from reality, but they are easier to parameterize, with the less number of input variables. One limitation of the radiative transfer models is that inversion to derive CWC is computationally very expensive. In order to reduce this limitation neural networks and genetic algorithms have been tested [5]. Forest Light InteractionModel (FLIM) assumes a homogeneous forest canopy, accounting for the tree shadows [4]. This paper uses FLIM to generate CWC from simulated MODIS satellite data. The model was selected since it is fairly complicated, but simpler to parameterize than models that account for the heterogeneity in the tree distribution. Evolutionary computation was applied to test the sensibility of several vegetation indexes to obtain CWC and to provide a robust model to predict this variable from the reectance response. In the last years, several new intelligent approaches emerge to obtain the content and spatial distribution of vegetation biochemical information over local to regional and eventually global scales through remote sensing data. These new approaches are related to soft computing techniques close to the computational intelligence. In [8], EWT and DM on dry samples estimations with neural nets were as good as other methods tested on the same dataset, such as inversion of radiative transfer models. DM estimations on fresh samples using ANN (r2=0.86) improved signicantly the results using inversion of radiative transfer models (r2=0.38). Applications of the genetic algorithms (GA) to a variety of optimization problems in remote sensing have been successfully demonstrated [9]. In [9] estimated LAI by integrating a canopy RT model and the GA optimization technique. This method was used to retrieve LAI from eld measured reectance as well as from atmospherically corrected Landsat ETM+ data. Four dierent ETM+ band combinations were tested to evaluate their eectiveness. The impacts of using the number of the genes were also examined. The major aim of this work is to assess the accuracy of estimating LAI information by means of evolutionary computation. Following section, we depict our evolutionary computational method. Finally, the authors present several successfully experimentations and conclusions.

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Experimental Results

The objective of this experiment is to nd an index that is able to correlate as far as possible with CwLAI value. This index will be formed by a data combination obtained beyond the rst seven bands of the MODIS sensor. Indexes those are normally used in remote sensing (e.g. NDVI) are not useful for this purpose. These indexes are lack of correlation with the searched CwLAI values. (All of them have coecient determination inferior than 0.1).
Table 1. Variations in Cross and Reproduction Operators Population size 1000 characters Likelihood cross 0.9 Likelihood reproduction 0.1 Kind of Selection tournament Tournament size 10 Elitism among 1 and 5 characters Final Nodes Seven bands MODIS (M1 .. M7)

Fig. 1. Correlation between CwLAI values and the ones which have been obtained with the index that is pointed out in the graph

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Fig. 2. Correlation between CwLAI values and the ones which have been obtained with the index that is pointed out in the graph

In order to nd this index inside the set of possible ones those are formed by means of data combination we have decided to use Evolutive Computation Techniques, and concretely, Genetic Algorithm (GA). Data combinations are obtained from MODIS sensor together with allowed operations for creating the index. In order to achieve the test with Genetic Algorithm, we have used a system of investigation in Evolutive Computation based in Java (EJC) [10] developed by Evolutionary Computation Laboratory (ECLab) George Mason University. For the whole test system we have used a set of 1000 samples obtained by means of FLIM model. From this set, 500 samples have been spent in training phase, the other 500 ones have been used for evaluating obtained solutions in training phase (see Table 1). Tests have also been achieved bearing in mind typical indexes in remote sensing like nal nodes. Modications in aptitude function have been carried out in order to incorporate RMSE values in optimization process. From Figure 1 to Figure 3, we can observe indexes that present the greatest correlation among all the possibilities in the dierent executions from the chosen evolutive schema are depicted. For each one of these indexes, a tested graph is showed. Testing has been achieved with training data set and test data set. We can observe RMSE values, degree Pearson correlation (r) and coecient

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Fig. 3. Correlation between CwLAI values and the ones which have been obtained with the index that is pointed out in the graph

determination (r2). Each gure is divided into four graphics. Each row represents the same expression but one is using a training data set and the other is working with a test data set. Training data sets are, obviously, oering better results than test data set. Training set spend a certain period of time in learning how to improve the solution. We can appreciate twelve dierent results for the proposed index. Six with training data set (right side in the gures) and six with test data set (left side in the gures) as we have explained before. Ideally, the best result would be the closest to 1, despite of the obtained indexes are close to 0.7 (acceptable correlation degree), it is very important to remark that we have tried not to execute complicated expressions in the genetic algorithm in order to obtain useful indexes. So that, results are easy to manage by a real teledetection system.

Conclusions and Future Work

We have shown how Genetic Algorithm improves the estimation of vegetation water content. This context information is vital to assess forest re risk and

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behavior. Authors plan to enhance this evolutionary technique incorporating some new features into the evolutive schema. Author are immersed in new experimentation, where they use a multi population schema where characters have the possibility of migrating from the current population, promoting diversity of the characters in dierent populations. Authors are working as well, in a new way of representing characters that were able to implement dierent operators of symbiotic variation, so that, we can make the most of this multi population schema.

References
1. Gao, B. -C., and Goetz, A. F. H. (1995). Retrieval of equivalent water thickness and information related to biochemical components of vegetation canopies from AVIRIS data. Remote Sensing of Environment, 52(3), 155?162. 2. Chuvieco, E., Cocero, D., Ria no, D., Martin, P., Martnez-Vega, J., de la Riva, J., et al. (2004). Combining NDVI and Surface Temperature for the estimation of live fuels moisture content in forest re danger rating. Remote Sensing of Environment, 92(3), 322?331. 3. Goel, N. S. (1988). Models of vegetation canopy reectance and their use in estimation of biophysical parameters from reectance data. Remote Sensing Reviews, 4, 1 - 212. 4. Rosema, A., Verhoef, W., Noorbergen, H., and Borgesius, J. J. (1995). A new forest light interaction model in support of forest monitoring. Remote Sensing of Environment, 42, 23- 41. 5. Xiao, X., Boles, S., Liu, J., Zhuang, D., Frolking, S., Li, C., et al. (2005). Mapping paddy rice agriculture in southern China using multi-temporal MODIS images. Remote Sensing of Environment, 95(4), 480?492. 6. Ceccato, P., N. Gobron, S. Flasse, B. Pinty and S. Tarantola 2002, Designing a spectral index to estimate vegetation water content from remote sensing data: Part 1 - Theoretical approach. Remote Sensing of Environment. 82(2-3): 188-197. 7. Ria no, D., P. Vaughan, E. Chuvieco, P.J. Zarco-Tejada and S.L. Ustin in press, Estimation of fuel moisture content by inversion of radiative transfer models to simulate equivalent water thickness and dry matter content. Analysis at leaf and canopy level. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing 8. David Riao, Susan L. Ustin, Luis Usero Estimation of fuel moisture content using neural networks. IWINACC 2005 9. Fang, H., Liang, S., and Kuusk, A. (2003). Retrieving leaf area index using a genetic algorithm with a canopy radiative transfer model. Remote Sensing of Environment, 85, 257-270. 10. Evolutionary Computation Laboratory (ECLab). Evolutive Computation based in Java (EJC). George Mason University [http://cs.gmu.edu/ eclab/projects/ecj/]