Wildfire Susceptibility Prediction Based on a CA-Based CCNN with Active Learning Optimization

Abstract

Wildfires cause great losses to the ecological environment, economy, and people’s safety and belongings. As a result, it is crucial to establish wildfire susceptibility models and delineate fire risk levels. It has been proven that the use of remote sensing data, such as meteorological and topographical data, can effectively predict and evaluate wildfire susceptibility. Accordingly, this paper converts meteorological and topographical data into fire-influencing factor raster maps for wildfire susceptibility prediction. The continuous convolutional neural network (CCNN for short) based on coordinate attention (CA for short) can aggregate different location information into channels of the network so as to enhance the feature expression ability; moreover, for different patches with different resolutions, the improved CCNN model does not need to change the structural parameters of the network, which improves the flexibility of the network application in different forest areas. In order to reduce the annotation of training samples, we adopt an active learning method to learn positive features by selecting high-confidence samples, which contributes to enhancing the discriminative ability of the network. We use fire probabilities output from the model to evaluate fire risk levels and generate the fire susceptibility map. Taking Chongqing Municipality in China as an example, the experimental results show that the CA-based CCNN model has a better classification performance; the accuracy reaches 91.7%, and AUC reaches 0.9487, which is 5.1% and 2.09% higher than the optimal comparative method, respectively. Furthermore, if an accuracy of about 86% is desired, our method only requires 50% of labeled samples and thus saves about 20% and 40% of the labeling efforts compared to the other two methods, respectively. Ultimately, the proposed model achieves the balance of high prediction accuracy and low annotation cost and is more helpful in classifying fire high warning zones and fire-free zones.