Video-Based FLame detection for the protection of cultural heritage

The majority of cultural heritage and archaeological sites, especiallyin the Mediterranean region, are covered with vegetation, whichincreases the risk of fires. These fires may also break out and spreadtowards nearby forests and other wooded land, or conversely start innearby forests and spread to archaeological sites. Beyond takingprecautionary measures to avoid a forest fire, early warning andimmediate response to a fire breakout are the only ways to avoidgreat losses and environmental and cultural heritage damages. Theuse of terrestrial systems, typically based on video cameras, iscurrently the most promising solution for advanced automatic wildfiresurveillance and monitoring due to its low cost and short responsetime. Early and accurate detection and localization of flame is anessential requirement of these systems, however, it remains achallenging issue due to the fact that many natural objects havesimilar characteristics with fire. This paper presents and comparesthree video-based flame detection techniques, which weredeveloped within the FIRESENSE EU research project, taking intoaccount the chaotic and complex nature of the fire phenomenonand the large variations of flame appearance in video. Experimentalresults show that the proposed methods provide high fire detectionrates with reasonable false alarm ratios.