Last modified: 2010-09-15
Abstract
Forest fire is natural phenomena with devastating consequences on ecological systems, infrastructure and human lives. Despite all technology and human forces, great fires are hard to control. Only effective way to fight forest fires is early detection and appropriate fast reaction, therefore great efforts are made to achieve early detection. We present automatic forest fire detection algorithm which is central part of the Intelligent Forest Fire Monitoring System based on the remotely controlled video cameras sensitive in visible spectra. Forest fires are detected in incipient stage using various autonomous advanced image analyses and understanding techniques. Video input is analysed to find visual signs of forest fire, particularly smoke during the day and flames during the night. Post-processing algorithms based on meteorological and video data fusion are applied and decision about raising an alarm is brought by a voting based strategy where weight is assigned to the output of each detection algorithm. If the suspicious region in the visual range of the camera is detected the alarm is delivered to the human operator who makes the final decision about delivering the alarm to the fire fighters or discarding a false alarm.