# FLAME 3 Dataset: Unleashing the Power of Radiometric Thermal UAV Imagery for Wildfire Management

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02831 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02831/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [FEANet: Feature-Enhanced Attention Network for RGB-Thermal Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08988/) (2021)
- [Aerial Imagery Pile burn detection using Deep Learning: the FLAME dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14036/) (2020)
- [Deep-Learning-Based Aerial Image Classification for Emergency Response Applications Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08716/) (2019)
- [A comprehensive survey of research towards AI-enabled unmanned aerial systems in pre-, active-, and post-wildfire management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02456/) (2024)
- [EmergencyNet: Efficient Aerial Image Classification for Drone-Based Emergency Monitoring Using Atrous Convolutional Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14006/) (2021)
- [DooDLeNet: Double DeepLab Enhanced Feature Fusion for Thermal-color Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10266/) (2022)
- [Thermal Image Calibration and Correction using Unpaired Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11582/) (2024)
- [Experimental Exploration of Compact Convolutional Neural Network Architectures for Non-temporal Real-time Fire Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09010/) (2019)
- [Hardware Acceleration for Real-Time Wildfire Detection Onboard Drone Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08105/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Seeing Heat with Color -- RGB-Only Wildfire Temperature Inference from SAM-Guided Multimodal Distillation using Radiometric Ground Truth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01638/) (2025)
- [Light-Weight Cross-Modal Enhancement Method with Benchmark Construction for UAV-based Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06011/) (2025)
- [Real-Time Wildfire Localization on the NASA Autonomous Modular Sensor using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14475/) (2026)
- [FlameVQA: A Physically-Grounded UAV Wildfire VQA Benchmark with Radiometric Thermal Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27128/) (2026)
- [WildFireVQA: A Large-Scale Radiometric Thermal VQA Benchmark for Aerial Wildfire Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20190/) (2026)
- [Multimodal RGB-Infrared Combination for UAV-Based Wildfire Segmentation: A Comparative Study on FLAME3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01390/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The increasing accessibility of radiometric thermal imaging sensors for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offers significant potential for advancing AI-driven aerial wildfire management. Radiometric imaging provides per-pixel temperature estimates, a valuable improvement over non-radiometric data that requires irradiance measurements to be converted into visible images using RGB color palettes. Despite its benefits, this technology has been underutilized largely due to a lack of available data for researchers. This study addresses this gap by introducing methods for collecting and processing synchronized visual spectrum and radiometric thermal imagery using UAVs at prescribed fires. The included imagery processing pipeline drastically simplifies and partially automates each step from data collection to neural network input. Further, we present the FLAME 3 dataset, the first comprehensive collection of side-by-side visual spectrum and radiometric thermal imagery of wildland fires. Building on our previous FLAME 1 and FLAME 2 datasets, FLAME 3 includes radiometric thermal Tag Image File Format (TIFFs) and nadir thermal plots, providing a new data type and collection method. This dataset aims to spur a new generation of machine learning models utilizing radiometric thermal imagery, potentially trivializing tasks such as aerial wildfire detection, segmentation, and assessment. A single-burn subset of FLAME 3 for computer vision applications is available on Kaggle with the full 6 burn set available to readers upon request.