IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - September 2023 - 108

as raw data in the original and unaltered state, as directly
collected from satellite instrumentation. On the other
hand, the European dataset provides data collected from a
third-party service for which preprocessing operations are
performed. The availability of raw data enables researchers
to apply the preferred preprocessing steps without any loss
of information. Furthermore, the monitored range of dates
of the new dataset spans from 2015 to 2022, whereas the
other two datasets span a smaller time period.
TABLE 1. THE COMPARISON AMONG DATASETS.
FEATURE
Region
Mission
Resolution (m)
Image size
Raw data
Channels
Forest fires
Start and end dates
CaBuAr (OURS)
California
Sentinel-2
20
5,490 × 5,490
ü
12
340
January 2015 to
December 2022
Total surface (km2) ~450,000
Burned surface
[MP/km2]
Postfire
Prefire
TD
~28/~11,000
ü
ü
~1 year
[11]
Europe
DATASET
The newly created dataset comprises L2A products of Sentinel-2,
a European Space Agency mission. The area of interest
is California, with the geographical distributions of the
events shown in Figure 1(b). We collected images of the same
area before and after the wildfire. It is essential to note that
the L2A product contains red, green, blue (RGB) channels as
well as other spectral bands in the infrared region and ultrablue
for a total of 12 channels. Depending on the band, they
have a resolution of 10 m, 20 m, or 60 m per pixel.
[12]
Indonesia
Sentinel-1/2 Landsat-8
10 (S2)
30
Up to 5,000
× 5,000
û
12
73
July 2017 to
July 2019
~19,000
ü
ü
#2 months
512 × 512
ü
8
227
January 2019
to December
2021
~46,000
~20/~2,000 ~8/~7,000
ü
û
/
The highest value in each line is highlighted in bold, except for the resolution case, in
which the lowest numerical value is highlighted. MP: the number of burned pixels in millions;
TD: the time difference between prefire and postfire acquisitions.
PREPROCESSING
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection
publicly provides the ground truth vector information,
which we converted into raster images. Each pixel contains
a binary value: one in the burned area and zero in the case
of undamaged areas. Although the registered wildfires span
from 1898 to 2022, we collected data only for wildfires from
2015 to 2022 because there were no Sentinel-2 images before
2015. We gathered the Sentinel-2 images directly from
Copernicus Open Access Hub.
To minimize the effects of vegetation regrowth and
postwildfire modifications,
images are collected within
one month after the wildfires are fully contained and extinguished.
A total number of 340 acquisitions associated
with 340 wildfires were downloaded, each being of size
5,490 × 5,490 pixels with a resolution of 20 m per pixel. The
few Sentinel-2 bands with different resolutions were either
upsampled or downsampled with bicubic interpolation to
reach the target resolution.
Prefire images have the same size and resolution as the
postfire acquisitions. To enforce coherence and similar
42
40
38
36
34
32
California
Satellite Tiles
40
38
36
34
-124 -122 -120 -118 -116 -114
Longitude (°)
(a)
-124 -122 -120 -118 -116 -114
Longitude (°)
(b)
Map tiles by Stamen Design, CC BY 3.0 -- Map data (C) OpenStreetMap contributors
FIGURE 1. (a) The satellite tiles coverage: the California administrative boundaries (red) versus the satellite tiles of the proposed dataset
(blue). (b) The location of the wildfires (red) inside the California boundaries (blue).
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IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2023
42
Latitude (°)
Latitude (°)
IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - September 2023

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