Two-Step Real-Time Night-Time Fire Detection in an Urban Environment Using Static ELASTIC-YOLOv3 and Temporal Fire-Tube

While the number of casualties and amount of property damage caused by fires in urban areas are increasing each year, studies on their automatic detection have not maintained pace with the scale of such fire damage. Camera-based fire detection systems have numerous advantages over conventional sensor-based methods, but most research in this area has been limited to daytime use. However, night-time fire detection in urban areas is more difficult to achieve than daytime detection owing to the presence of ambient lighting such as headlights, neon signs, and streetlights. Therefore, in this study, we propose an algorithm that can quickly detect a fire at night in urban areas by reflecting its night-time characteristics. It is termed ELASTIC-YOLOv3 (which is an improvement over the existing YOLOv3) to detect fire candidate areas quickly and accurately, regardless of the size of the fire during the pre-processing stage. To reflect the dynamic characteristics of a night-time flame, N frames are accumulated to create a temporal fire-tube, and a histogram of the optical flow of the flame is extracted from the fire-tube and converted into a bag-of-features (BoF) histogram. The BoF is then applied to a random forest classifier, which achieves a fast classification and high classification performance of the tabular features to verify a fire candidate. Based on a performance comparison against a few other state-of-the-art fire detection methods, the proposed method can increase the fire detection at night compared to deep neural network (DNN)-based methods and achieves a reduced processing time without any loss in accuracy.