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Forest inspection is a crucial part of forest management, playing a key role in fire prevention, forest resource monitoring, and more. However, traditional manual inspections are highly inefficient, and any delay in detection can cause irreversible damage and consequences to forest resources. With technological advancements and applications, technology is beginning to replace traditional manual labor in forest inspections.
GDU Aviation, with its extensive experience in forest inspections, has chosen Baidu PaddlePaddle as its partner. Leveraging PaddlePaddle's deep learning technologies, PaddleSeg and PaddleDetection, GDU has developed a specialized autonomous flying platform for forest inspections. Using the GDU Flight MS management platform, the drone can autonomously patrol large forest areas, monitor fire conditions, detect illegal intrusions, and monitor forest tree cutting.
Manual Inspection
Currently, most forest bureaus worldwide still rely primarily on manual inspections, facing numerous challenges.
Pain Points in Manual Inspection for Fire Prevention and Firefighting
Traditional Drone Inspections
Many of these pain points can be significantly addressed by intelligent drone inspections. The efficacy of intelligent drone inspection scan be summarized in six words: detailed, comprehensive, fast, accurate, stable. In simple terms, drone inspections of forests are not only fast, efficient, and low-cost but also highly accurate, wide-ranging, low-risk, and stable.
Advantages of Traditional Drone Inspections for Fire Prevention and Firefighting
Although some achievements have been made, the application of inspection drones in various fields is still in the exploration and popularization stage. To achieve larger-scale commercial use, several issues need to be addressed, with technical breakthroughs being the most critical. Technology drives product implementation, and only through continuous upgrades can better application experiences be provided.
PaddlePaddle has advanced GDU drones in the process of industrial intelligence. Thanks to the empowerment of PaddlePaddle's deep learning technology, GDU drones have formed an absolute product advantage. For example, they can identify up to 30 different targets, have night monitoring, remote temperature measurement, intelligent patrol, and quick selection and automatic tracking of moving targets. Currently, PaddlePaddle has been applied in GDU's eight major industries and 17 scenarios, and has been deployed in 155 forest police bureaus in Southeast Asia.
After comprehensive comparisons of multiple domestic and international deep learning frameworks and platforms, GDU chose Baidu PaddlePaddle. PaddlePaddle provides good support for industrial practice, not only open-sourcing models trained on large-scale data in real business scenarios but also launching the zero-threshold AI development platform EasyDL, accelerating the iteration speed of AI technology in actual business and better solving GDU's real business problems.
GDU developed the GDU Flight MS drone application management platform based on PaddleSeg technology, which enables high-precision real-time mapping and intelligent semantic segmentation analysis of forest areas. By conducting semantic analysis and AI comparison of forest real-time images at different inspection times, it realizes intelligent analysis of forest vegetation changes, including changes in construction sites, farmland, virgin forests, and artificial forests, assisting forest bureaus in promptly preventing illegal logging and protecting forest resources.
Based on PaddleDetection technology, GDU achievedlarge-scale autonomous forest inspection and fire monitoring. PaddleDetectionis a target detection development suite based on PaddlePaddle, featuringsuperior performance, easy deployment, and flexible algorithm researchrequirements. The core operators used in the models of this technology areimplemented in C++ or CUDA, and based on PaddlePaddle's high-performanceinference engine, it can be easily deployed on various hardware platforms.Modular design is used to decouple each component, allowing easy constructionof various detection models based on configuration files. In addition tosignificantly improving inspection efficiency and range, GDU also uses BaiduPaddleDetection technology for smoke and fire point detection, achievinglarge-scale forest fire monitoring. Once a fire is detected, an alert is sentto the control center, assisting the forest bureau in promptly coordinatingwith other agencies to control the fire.
Compared to previous manual inspections, this system's efficiency has increased by 200%, with the inspection range rising from 40% to 100% full coverage. The recall rate increased from 75.64% to 90%, and the accuracy improved from 69.58% to 91.6%.
GDU Aviation Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. is a high-tech enterprise focusing on the research, production, and sales of drones. The company has years of accumulation in drone flight control, image stabilization, power system design, and infrared imaging technology, providing a solid foundation for continuous research and development of drone products and the continuous improvement of drone applications. GDU focuses on the consumer market and simultaneously serves the fields of electricity, oil, fire protection, security, forest fire prevention, rescue, environmental protection, agriculture, geology, and surveying and mapping, creating a professional-grade unmanned aerial vehicle system.
