Flame recognition in video

This paper presents an automatic system for fire detection in video sequences. There are several previous methods to detect fire, however, all except two use spectroscopy or particle sensors. The two that use visual information suffer from the inability to cope with a moving camera or a moving scene. One of these is not able to work on general data, such as movie sequences. The other is too simplistic and unrestrictive in determining what is considered fire; so that it can be used reliably only in aircraft dry bays. We propose a system that uses color and motion information computed from video sequences to locate fire. This is done by first using an approach that is based upon creating a Gaussian-smoothed color histogram to detect the fire-colored pixels, and then using a temporal variation of pixels to determine which of these pixels are actually fire pixels. Next, some spurious fire pixels are automatically removed using an erode operation, and some missing fire pixels are found using region growing method. Unlike the two previous vision-based methods for fire detection, our method is applicable to more areas because of its insensitivity to camera motion. Two specific applications not possible with previous algorithms are the recognition of fire in the presence of global camera motion or scene motion and the recognition of fire in movies for possible use in an automatic rating system. We show that our method works in a variety of conditions, and that it can automatically determine when it has insufficient information.