Measuring Fire Spread Rate with Digital Image Processing Method

In the past few years, forest fire and building fire accidents occurred frequently, which has been attracting more and more attentions on the prevention and control of such kind of fire. In view of the timeliness and accuracy limitations of typical early fire spread measurement and detection methods, this paper proposes a new digital image processing based fire spread rate measurement method. The color and motion characteristics of flame images has been examined to perform image segmentation, resulting in the extracted fires in image space. Then, fire spreading rate is calculated after geometric correction. Results indicate that the proposed method has the advantages of simple implementation, rapid acquisition and accurate results.