Advances Toward the Next Generation Fire Detection: Deep LSTM Variational Autoencoder for Improved Sensitivity and Reliability

Fire detection is a critical component of a building safety monitoring system and remains an important research area with weighty practical relevance. Significant advances have occurred in recent years in building automation, and the operation of buildings has become more complex and requires ever more effective monitoring systems. In this work, we develop a novel fire detection method using deep Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks and variational autoencoder (VAE) to meet these increasingly stringent requirements and outperform existing fire detection methods. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we develop high-fidelity simulations, and we use datasets from real-world fire and non-fire experiments provided by NIST. We compare and discuss the performance of our proposed fire detection with alternative methods, including the standard LSTM, cumulative sum control chart (CUSUM), exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA), and two currently used fixed-temperature heat detectors. The results using the simulation-based and the real-world experiments are complementary, and they indicate that the LSTM-VAE robustly outperforms the other detection methods with, for example, statistically significant shorter alarm time lags, no missed detection, and no false alarms. The results also identify shortcomings of other detection methods and indicate a clear ranking among them (LSTM-VAE>-EWMA >LSTM>-CUSUM).