Forest fires and generally wildfires represent a constant threat to ecological systems, infrastructure and human lives. In the last decade the threat of forest fires has increased significantly because of the climate changes. Apart from preventive measures, early fire detection on one side and quick and appropriate intervention on the other, are measures of vital importance for wildfire damage minimization.

Early fire detection is traditionally based on human wildfire surveillance, but modern Information-Communication Technologies (ICT) could offer advanced automatic wildfire observers as a replacement for human wildfire observation.  Modern automatic wildfire observers could be used not only for early fire detection, but also for distant video presence, the feature quite important in fire fighting stage.

This Web portal is dedicated to automatic wildfire observers and particularly focused on the automatic detection and recognition of the smoke generated by wildfire, because the smoke detection is still the most important feature of today’s automatic wildfire observers.

Wildfire observers and smoke recognition portal is intended to be a place for collaboration regarding every aspect of automated smoke-detection process. That includes different methods and algorithms for wildfire smoke-detection, image and video databases, definition of metrics regarding algorithm evaluation and similar. It is planned to be a collaborative site, where different engineers contribute their experience trough writing articles, adding smoke images for testing and training, and of course developing different algorithms for smoke detection.

The Web site is established and maintained by Center for wildfire research which belongs to University of Split Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture.