Optimal Placement and Intelligent Smoke Detection Algorithm for Wildfire-Monitoring Cameras

Smoke produced by wildfires is usually visible much earlier than flames. Hence, early detection of wildfire smoke is essential to prevent severe property losses and heavy casualties from catastrophic wildfires. Camera networks are being built and expanded to achieve timely wildfire smoke detection. To achieve the best camera coverage and detection accuracy with limited budget, an intelligent video smoke detection algorithm and an optimal wildfire camera placement strategy are in a critical need. In this paper, we propose an efficient video smoke detection framework designed for embedded applications on local cameras. It consists of two modules. In the first module, the original video frames are processed by local binary patterns and a dense optical flow estimator. In the second module, the produced features are then fed into a lightweight deep convolutional neural network, which serves as a binary classifier to detect the presence of smoke. We also formulate the wildfire camera placement problem as a binary integer programming problem to minimize the overall fire risk of a given area. Case studies on real-world videos are carried out to validate the accuracy as well as the computational and memory efficiency of the proposed smoke detection framework. We also validate our proposed camera placement strategy by simulating the deployment of wildfire cameras across a test region in Southern California.