The University of Essex, a UK-based public research university is engaging in a first of its kind project in India using AI and analytics to better fight the forest fires in Uttarakhand.The landmark project is funded by the UK Government’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and led by a team of multi-disciplinary experts at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Lucknow (IIIT-L) and the University of Essex.
Dr Haider Raza, from the School of Computer Science and Electronics Engineering, University of Essex, is leading the project with Dr. Vishal Krishna Singh, Dr. Niharika Anand (expert in Wireless Sensor Networks, 4G and 5G technologies & IoT) and Dr. Soumendu Chakraborty (expert in Image Processing, Computer Vision & Medical Image Analysis) from IIIT-L, actively supporting.
The team has completed a comprehensive analysis of underlying reasons for forest fires in the Pauri Garhwal district of Uttarakhand and will deploy AI-enabled IoT kit to protect the forest from fires through wireless monitoring systems. In the long term it will explore the feasibility of combining IoT sensors and drone-based image capturing to predict forest fires, map species distribution and poaching routes.
Talking of the project, Dr. Raza, said, “The analysis of Wireless Sensor and IoT device outputs have given us a view of the reasons behind existing approaches being ineffective. We have developed an event intensity mathematical model to specifically discriminate multiple acoustic events in a forest region. “We are also looking to develop an event detection algorithm that can accurately report multiple acoustic events and a data classification algorithm on top of it for accurate inference and decision making. The team at IIIT-L have been very helpful and brought numerous expert inputs to the project in every area which has been invaluable.Our proposed solutions are addressing Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 13, 15 and 17.”
