ELIS Multimedia Lab

VIDEO FIRE DETECTION

USING NON-VISIBLE LIGHT

Steven Verstockt, R. Dekeerschieter, A. Vanoosthuyse, B. Merci, B. Sette, P. Lambert, and R. Van de Walle
Ghent University IBBT Faculty of Engineering Department of Electronics and Information Systems Multimedia Lab

VIDEO FIRE DETECTION USING NON-VISIBLE LIGHT Steven Verstockt et al.

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OVERVIEW
Introduction
- The need for VFD in non-visible light (~ thermal IR imaging)?

LWIR-based flame detector

- Hot object segmentation - Low-cost visual flame features

Multi-sensor fire detection Conclusions / Q&A

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The need for VFD ?

Effective response to fire requires accurate & timely information of its evolution. Limitations of traditional sensors
Require close proximity to the fire (~ transport delay) (Mostly) cannot provide additional information about fire location, size, Generally limited to indoors and are not able to understand the scene VFD promises fast detection and accurate localization VFD can be a viable alternative or complement for the more traditional sensors and can help shorten the timeline
[ Verstockt et al.: State of the art in vision-based fire and smoke detection. Proc. 14th International Conference on Automatic Fire Detection. (AUBE 2009) ]

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The need for VFD in non-visible light ?

Use of IR cameras can be of added value
Limitations of Ordinary VFD -> need for sufficient and specific lighting conditions -> vulnerable to false alarms due to variability of shape, motion, colors, and patterns of smoke and flames

Combination of IR and ordinary VFD is considered to be a win-win!

Project Eagle - univ. Coimbra

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Related work
IR thermal imaging already used successfully in many video surveillance applications
traffic safety (~ pedestrian detection) airport security, detection of elevated body temperature (swine flu) material inspection

Due to steady price-reduction, #IR imaging applications

., but the number of IR-based VFDs is still limited.

[Owrutsky et al., Long wavelength video detection of fire in ship compartments] [Toreyin et al., Fire Detection in Infrared Video Using Wavelet Analysis] [Bosch et al., Object discrimination by infrared image processing]
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LWIR-based flame detector

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Selection of the spectral range

SWIR, MWIR of LWIR ? SWIR -> near the visible bands -> behavior similar to visible light -> needs (some) external illumination (~ reflected energy) MWIR/LWIR -> radiated energy -> no need for external illumination Flames -> best visible + less disturbed by other objects in LWIR LWIR is not sensitive to dust, smoke, and fog
(~ looking through smoke)

The further we go in the infrared spectrum, the more the visual perceptibility decreased and the thermal perceptibility increased
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Dynamic background subtraction

Moving object detection (with quantized shifted luminosity) Accelerates and optimizes IR image segmentation Subtract frame Fn+1 with everything that remains constant over time (=> estimated background BGn+1 , which is updated dynamically)

Back-step correction fixes errors of previous BG estimations

[ Verstockt et al.: AUBE 2009 ]

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Hot object segmentation

Automatic histogram based image thresholding [Otsu et al.] Segments 2 classes : hot foreground and cold(er) background Treshold-based minimalization of intra-class variance

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Low-cost LWIR flame features

1. Bounding Box Disorder (BBD)
BB of flames varies considerably over time in both directions and have a high degree of disorder

Flames -> BBD close to 1; more static objects -> BBD near to 0

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Low-cost LWIR flame features

2. Turbulence Variance (TVar)

Indicator for area change / boundary roughness Flames -> TVar close to 1

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Low-cost LWIR flame features

3. Principal Orientation Disorder (POD)
Disorder in principal orientation for flames >> static objects POD based on orientation angle between x-axis and major axis Flames -> POD close to 1

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LWIR FLAME FEATURES

4. Histogram Roughness (HR)
Histograms of flame regions are very rough Flame region intensities range almost over whole histogram

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Global classifier
LWIR-based flame feature -> probability between 0 and 1 Global classifier = mean of 4 low-cost flame feature probabilities

Overall flame probability P, is compared to alarm threshold tfire

IF P(Flames) > tfire

-> raise fire alarm

Tfire is an experimentally determined threshold (= 0.7) alternative ? future work

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Experimental setup
Xenics Gobi-384 LWIR camera -> 8 14 m spectral range Xenics Xeneth software -> extract appropriate grayscale video images out of thermal imaging camera Own detection algorithm (written in Matlab) + add-ons for extrema detection + add-ons for histogram analysis Performance evaluation framework (GT creation,) Fire/non-fire real case scenarios

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Experimental results

8 14 m spectral range

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Experimental results: problems

Distance <> Temperature IR reflections

IR blocking
(e.g. glass, water)

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MULTI-SENSOR FIRE DETECTION

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Low-cost visual flame features

Spatial Flame Color Disorder (SFCD)

Flame colors belong to red-yellow color range Flame color does not remain steady > spatial disorder

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MULTI-SENSOR FIRE DETECTION

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CONCLUSIONS
Proposed LWIR-based flame detector yields good results -> further testing on a broader range of video sequences is necessary for a more adequate performance evaluation. Systems that combine visible and LWIR fire detection are proven to be more accurate and sensitive than either alone.

-> Combination of IR and ordinary VFD is a win-win!

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Questions?
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