HPWREN Web Interface – Wildfire Monitoring
The Project
This is an overview of my web interface for the HPWREN project at UCSD. HPWREN (High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network) has been running for over 20 years and deployed over 400 cameras and a significant number of meteorological sensors in Southern California. HPWREN supports real-time wildfire monitoring and other applications in research, education, and public safety. I decided to implement a new web interface for HPWREN to help my community. This interface has many new features that let users view images live or retrospective, create custom views of cameras that see wildfires, view weather on the map or as a plot, etc. The web interface is available at: https://www.hpwren.ucsd.edu/cameras/ A challenge in the Interactive Image Flow Interface (IIFI) was to implement the play functionality such that users could watch a fluid time-lapse, while keeping all settings for zoom, contrast, etc. I solved this by preloading 10 images in advance and caching them in background, which lets users view the images without waiting for them to load. Another challenge was implementing the Fisheye Correction feature. I solved this by using a spherical projection to map destination pixels to original image pixels. I had to test many values for the correction factors until the image was corrected accurately.
