By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net
AMID the availability of off-the-shelf fire prevention devices that are mostly expensive, two researchers from the University of the Philippines Los Banos developed a low-cost fire detection mechanism that only uses an ordinary computer and a webcam.
Professor Jaderick Pabico and his colleague Deiter Dizon have designed a real-time fire detection system using an existing software algorithm on a computer that connects to a USB-mounted web camera.
Unlike most commercial fire detection sensors that use infrared and heat, web cameras can identify spectral, spatial and temporal properties of fires — actually “seeing” the fire.
The use of color video streams from a web camera is more effective as it can also provide a visual profile of the ongoing fire, its speed of growth, location and size, which are determined by the computer’s complex algorithms.
Even the sound from a fire can be recorded to help in analyzing the fire.
Pabico and Dizon said the criteria can be adjusted to improve detection under specific environments. Their system aims to help decisionmakers avoid future fire damage while also aiding arson and forensic investigators.
Pabico and Dizon reported that they tested the system on various indoor and outdoor fires and claim that it detected real fire events and ignored 84 percent of non-fire events.
It also detected non-fire events as fire events, or false alarms, 12 percent of the time and ignored real fire events four percent of the time.
On the other hand, the two scientists explained that the ignored fire events were from controlled fires such as the blue flame from a torch welder and a motionless flame from a gas stove.
“Based on our tests, our vision-based fire detection system from off-the-shelf hardware can be a cheap yet flexible alternative to traditional ones,” they said in their paper.
Dizon and Pabico’s paper was presented during the recently held 29th Annual Scientific Meeting of the National Academy of Science and Technology.
October 8th, 2007 at 10:08 am
[...] Inside Science : Researchers develop fire prevention tools using webcam [...]
October 8th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
Hello!
Yay! Sir Jade is really making my paper broadcasted… Thanks also to inquirer for featuring our research study here in INQ.
Anyway, Mr. Alex, I have one small request. My name is mispelled in the article, can you update it(’Dieter’ to ‘Deiter’)? Thanks in advance!!!
October 9th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
[...] Inside Science : Researchers develop fire prevention tools using webcam [...]
October 11th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Thanks for the write-up. For young Filipino researchers, the online version of the abstract of this research can be found at http://www.ics.uplb.edu.ph/node/226
The actual citation is:
DA Dizon and JP Pabico. 2007. A low-cost machine vision system for real-time fire detection. Transactions of the National Academy of Science and Technology of the Philippines 29(1):130-131.