Survey on Different Smoke Detection Techniques Using Image

Processing
Surya.T.S, Suchithra.M.S
P.G. Student, Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Christ Knowledge City , Ernakulam, India
surya.tharayil@gmail.com, suchithrams194@gmail.com

different characteristics of smoke. Smoke detection

Abstract- The most significant parts of protective
and monitoring systems are the fire detection
systems. Fire detection is very important for the
safety of the people. The main causes of disasters are
the failure in fire detection and lack of information.
Smoke is the good indicator of fire. Fire can be
detected effectively by using different image
processing techniques. In image processing, images
like video frames or photographs are the inputs and
output may be either an image or image
characteristics. Various tasks like classification,
extracting the features, recognizing different patterns
can be performed using image processing. Image
processing techniques greatly help to detect fire in a
good manner and thereby avoid dangerous situation
according to the output. This paper describes
different techniques used for fire and smoke
detection.
Index Terms- Wavelet Transform, Support Vector
Machine, Covariance Descriptors, Multi-Layers
Perceptron, Image Fusion
I. INTRODUCTION
Fire detection is very crucial for the safety of the
people. Fire detection can be possible through
different image processing techniques. Smoke is the
good indicator of fire. By analyzing the features and
other characteristics present in the image, fire and
smoke can be detected. This paper describes different
fire detection techniques, its advantages and
disadvantages. Smoke is a significant hint for early
fire detection. Smoke become visible before flames
on forest fires in most of the times, and can detect
fires in their early stages to reduce dangerous
situation caused by fire.
method is one of the efficient and challenging
problems mainly in open environment, such as port,
chemical plants and power plants as they cause harm
to surrounding areas.
In such areas, fire or flame detection methods [2] are
limited because fire or flames sources cannot always
fall properly into the range of sensors due to their
positions and sizes. So smoke detection is good and
effective for early fire detection in such cases. In
conventional methods heat or smoke sensors are used
for the detection of fire. These sensors had some
limitations like time and they cannot cover a wide
range of area. To overcome such limitations video
fire detection systems are used.
Different image processing can be used to detect
smoke. In image processing image is taken as input
and the output may either an image or parameters or
characteristics of an image. It is the processing of 2D
image. Various tasks like classification, extracting
the features, recognizing different patterns can be
performed using image processing. The features and
textures of smoke can extract using image processing
techniques. By these techniques the dangerous
situations caused due to fire can be avoided and save
the people. This paper describes different smoke
detection techniques and their comparison.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
R. Gonzalez-Gonzalez et al. [6] proposed a method to
detect fire by smoke detection based on wavelet. In
this smoke detection method, image processing on
video signals is proposed. The SWT transform is
used for the area detection of ROI’s. This method
comprises of three steps.

Detection methods based on image are more effective
than other techniques which use certain sensor
devices. Characteristics of smoke need to be
considering when dealing with image information.
Semi–transparency, response to environmental
conditions, unsteady nature of smoke shape are the
In the first step, preprocessing is performed and the
image is resized and transformed to grayscale image.
Finally indexed the image using indexation. The
second step involves high frequencies of an image is
eliminated using SWT and reconstruct the image by
inverse SWT. Inorder to group the intensity colors

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that are closed to each other is the main purpose of
image indexation.
Histogram analysis is used to determine the
indexation levels. After that compare the image with
a non-smoke frame and selecting those pixels that are
change from one scene to another. The final stage
consists of smoke verification algorithm inorder to
determine whether ROI is increasing its area and to
reduce the generation of false alarm. These three
steps are combined together to form the final result.
Hidenori Maruta et al. [7] proposed another method
for smoke detection based on support vector
machine. In this approach robust and novel smoke
detection method is proposed using support vector
machine. Firstly preprocessing is performed by
extracting moving objects of images. The
preprocessing consists of five steps: image
subtraction and
accumulation, image binarization, morphological
operation, extraction of Feret’s regions and creation
of the image mask. Image subtraction is used to
extract regions of moving object. Inorder to eliminate
noise like regions binarization and morphological
operations are used. The position and approximated
shape of the object is obtained by identifying Feret’s
diameter is called feret’s region.
After preprocessing, perform texture analysis and
extract the texture features. These texture features
become the component of feature vector. Feature
vector is applied as the input vector and support
vector machine is used to classify smoke or not.
Smoke detection method involves three steps:
analysing texture features, discrimination of Feret’s
region using support vector machine and time
accumulation.
Inorder to extract feature vectors of the image,
texture analysis is performed in this method. Support
vector machine is used to classify smoke or non-
smoke from the extracted image. The main advantage
of this method is that more accurate extraction of
smoke areas in image can be obtained using SVM.
Y. Habiboglu et al. [9] proposed another method that
uses covariance descriptors for fire detection. In this
method, color, spatial and domain information are
combined by using covariance descriptors for each
spatio-temporal block. The blocks are generated by
dividing the flame colored region into 3D regions.
This method used a covariance matrix for the
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detection of flames. Background subtraction method
is not used in this approach.
To detect fire, divides the video into spatio temporal
blocks and covariance features are computed from
these blocks. Using an SVM classifier, the flame
colored region are classified by using the spatial and
temporal characteristics. These classified flame
colored regions are tested using video data that
contain flames and flame colored objects.
For the classification of pixel colors chromatic color
model [4] is used and analysed fire colored pixels.
Object detection and texture classification [5] are
performed by applied covariance descriptors [5].
Inorder to define spatio-temporal blocks temporal
derivatives are calculated along with spatial
parameters. Spatial temporal blocks can be defined
using covariance matrices. Then compute the
covariance values of the pixel property vectors in
spatio-temporal blocks.
For classification, support vector machine is trained.
According to the number positively classified video
blocks and their positions, confidence value is
determined for fire detection. This method is
computationally efficient. Covariance approach is
well suited for detection of flames. Drawback of this
method is that, it is well suited when the fire is
clearly visible. If the fire is far away from the camera
and covered with dense smoke, this method performs
poorly.
Pietro Morerio et al. [10] proposed another method
that uses color features and motion analysis to detect
fire and smoke. Smoke is an good indicator of fire
and can easily determine the presence of fire. In this
method classify the pixel as fire, smoke or
background pixel and then clustered the pixels.
Then analyze the internal motion of region to identify
whether they are dangerous. In this approach a fire
and smoke detection system is proposed and contains
five modules:
change detection, fire features extraction, smoke
features extraction and chaotic motion detection.
Page 17

Fig. 1. Fire and smoke detection module’s structure
In change and motion detection module background
subtraction is used to identify pixels which behave
differently from the normal behavior of the
background image. In color spaces and features
extraction module performs a separation between fire
pixel and smoke pixels from other pixels. In the case
of smoke, separation is performed by swapping to
L*a*b space [8]. Separation of fire pixels is
accomplished by moving to YCbCr. Then pixels
separated by change detection and feature extraction
are joined together to get connected regions in region
growing module. After that chaotic motion analysis is
performed.
After this analysis data fusion is conducted in which
a pre-alarm is generated. Main purpose of data fusion
is to filter false alarms. Data fusion task is
accomplished by classifying the pre-alarm rectangles
using a multi-layered perceptron (MLP) [1].MLP
consists of multi-layered network includes input
layer, hidden layer and output layers. In this method
three output neurons are considered and it represents
three pre-alarm states: pre-alarm of smoke type, pre-
alarm of fire type and no pre-alarm. Finally, a simple
tracking algorithm is used on superposition of pre-
alarm regions [3] to filter false alarms.
MehdiTorabnezhad et al. [11] proposed another
method that used image fusion technique to detect
smoke. In this method, combine visual and thermal
information to improve the rate of fire detection. The
invisibility of smoke in LWIR image can distinguish
smoke from smoke like objects. In-frared images do
not detect smoke in the images but can detect smoke
like object. By combining visible and IR images
smoke can be distinguished. Based on characteristics
of visual and thermal smoke images a potential
smoke mask is created. In-order to reduce false
alarms, PSM is further analyzed by dis-order
measurements and energy calculations. For the
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detection of short range smoke visible and IR image
fusion algorithm is used. Scope of this paper is to
detect the smoke as an indicator of fire. Here visible
and infrared images are combined togeth-er to
distinguish smoke from smoke like objects. Earlier
ap-proach that uses sensor or visible images only
gives false alarms.
Visible images capture both smoke and smoke like
ob-jects. Infrared images do not capture smoke.
Integrating these images give correct information
about smoke. Objective of this paper is to save
people, forest from the fire. By this meth-od
generation of false alarm can be reduced to a great
extent.
The proposed algorithm consists of two phases. In the
first phase combine visual and thermal information of
the smoke and potential smoke mask is generated.
PSM is again analyzed to differentiate true and false
alarms. This method is very efficient and detects
smoke successfully. Improves the fire detection rate
and reduces the generation of false alarm. The
drawback of this method is Correct and punctual
detec-tion of fire is not possible and comparison is
required to identify smoke.
Fig.2. Flow chart of Smoke detection
algorithm
III. CONCLUSION
Different smoke detection techniques have been
proposed for safety and protection of the people and
environment. It is very crucial to develop an
appropriate detection system to avoid dangerous
situation caused due to fire. Wavelet based smoke
detection approach is useful for smoke detection in
outdoor video sequences. This approach is robust and
Page 18
reduces the gen-eration of false alarms due to the
smoke verification al-gorithm. Smoke detection
method using support vector ma-chine is based on the
texture analysis and the support vector classifier is
also efficient method. In this method, the texture
features are used as the input vector and determine
whether the candidate regions are smoke regions or
not with non–lin-ear SVM. Here classifiers are used
to classify smoke and other objects. Covariance
method is mainly suited for flame detec-tion because
flames exhibit random behavior. In this method use
temporally extended covariance matrices
representing all the information together. The method
works well when the fire is clearly visible and in
close range. Background subtraction method is not
used in this approach. If the fire is small and far away
from the camera or covered by dense smoke the
method perform poorly. This method is
computationally efficient. Fire and smoke detection
method based on color features and mo-tion analysis
classify the pixels as fire, smoke or background
pixels. In this method, information of visible and
infrared im-ages is combined for the smoke detection
in short range. Smoke and smoke like objects can be
distinguished by comb-ing visible and infrared
images. This method is very efficient and detects
smoke successfully. Improves the fire detection rate
and reduces the generation of false alarm. The
drawback of this method is Correct and punctual
detection of fire is not possible and comparison is
required to identify smoke.
classification,” Computer Vision– ECCV 2006, pp.
589–600, 2006.
[6] R. Gonzalez-Gonzalez, V. Alarcon-Aquino,
R. Rosas-Romero, O. Starostenko, J. Rodriguez-
Asomoza, “Wavelet-Based Smoke Detection in
Outdoor Video Sequences,” 978-1-4244-7773-
9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE
[7] Hidenori Maruta, Akihiro Nakamura, Fujio
Kurokawa, “A Novel Smoke Detection Method
Using Support Vector Machine,” 978-1-4244-6890-
4/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE.
[8] CELIK Turgay, “Fast and efficient method
for fire detection using image processing,” ETRI
journal, vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 881– 890, 2010, eng.
[9] Y. Habiboglu, O. Gunay, and A. Cetin,
"Flame detection method in video using covariance
descriptors," IEEE International Conference on
Speech and Signal Processing, pp. 1817-1820, 2011.
[10] Pietro Morerio, Lucio Marcenaro, Carlo S.
Regazzoni, Gianluca Gera, "Early fire and smoke
detection based on colour features and motion
Analysis," 978-1-4673-2533-2/12/$26.00 ©2012
IEEE.
[11] MehdiTorabnezhad, Ali Aghagolzadeh,
HadiSeyedarabi, “Visible and IR image fusion
algorithm for short range smoke detection,” IEEE
International Conference on Robotics and
Mechatronics, 2013.

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