Real-time Smoke and Flame Detection in (infra-red) Video - A Special
Case for Dynamic Texture Detection

B. Ugur Toreyin

MRC 334 – Thursday, August 9, 3pm


Abstract:

Dynamic textures are common in natural scenes. Examples of dynamic
textures in video include fire, smoke, clouds, trees in the wind, sea
and ocean waves etc. Researchers extensively studied 2-D textures and
related problems in the field of image processing. On the other hand,
there is very little research on dynamic texture detection in video.
In this talk, wavelet based methods developed for real-time smoke and
fire detection in both visible-range and infra-red (IR) video are
presented. It is assumed the camera monitoring the scene is
stationary.

Smoke is semi-transparent at the early stages of fire. Edges present
in image frames start loosing their sharpness and this leads to an
energy decrease in the high-band frequency content of the image. Local
extrema in the wavelet domain correspond to edges in an image.
Decrease in the energy content of these edges is an important
indicator of smoke in the viewing range of the camera.

Image regions containing flames appear as fire-colored (bright) moving
regions in (IR) video. In addition to ordinary motion and color
(brightness) clues, the flame flicker process is also detected by
using a hidden Markov model (HMM) describing the temporal behavior.
Image frames are also analyzed spatially. Boundaries of flames are
represented in wavelet domain. High frequency nature of the boundaries
of fire regions is also used as a clue to model the flame flicker.
Temporal and spatial clues extracted from the video are combined to
reach a final decision.


Biography:

B. Ugur Toreyin obtained his M.S. degree in 2003, from the Electrical
and Electronics Engineering department of Bilkent University, Ankara,
Turkey, where he is currently a PhD candidate and a research and
teaching assistant. He received his B.S. degree from the Electrical
and Electronics Engineering department of Middle East Technical
University, Ankara, Turkey, in 2001. His research interests are in the
area of signal processing with an emphasis on image and video
processing, pattern recognition, multi-modal signal processing and
computer vision. Toreyin published numerous scientific papers in
peer-reviewed conferences and journals, and holds several national and
international patents (pending). He is currently a visiting researcher
at the University of Minnesota.