Smoke detection based on fire-starting regions

Smoke detection is very important for fire detection, because smoke usually occurs before a fire breaks out. Smoke has a variety of characteristics, such as color, shape, texture, and so on. Using these characteristics, there has been a lot of research on smoke detection based on image processing. However, smoke detection is still difficult, because these characteristics can change due to environmental factors, such as wind and lighting changes. So, in this paper, a new smoke detection method based on fire-starting regions is presented to reduce sensitivity to environmental factors. The proposed method consists of three main parts: i) generating a candidate smoke region, ii) fire starting-region detection, and iii) detecting smoke based on fire-starting regions and predicting the direction of smoke movement. As a result, the proposed smoke detection method is less sensitive to the motion of non-smoke objects (humans, shadows, vehicles, etc.) and can detect smoke quickly by determining the fire-starting region where the smoke is generated. The proposed detection method can be applied to a video surveillance system and a fire- and smoke-analysis system. Copyrights © 2019 The Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers