Fire Threat Detection From Videos with Q-Rough Sets

This article defines new methods for unsupervised fire region segmentation and fire threat detection from video stream. Fire in control serves a number of purposes to human civilization, but it could simultaneously be a threat once its spread becomes uncontrolled. There exists many methods on fire region segmentation and fire non-fire classification. But the approaches to determine the threat associated with fire is relatively scare, and no such unsupervised method has been formulated yet. Here we focus on developing an unsupervised method with which the threat of fire can be quantified and accordingly generate an alarm in automated surveillance systems in indoor as well as in outdoors. Fire region segmentation without any manual intervention/ labelled data set is a major challenge while formulating such a method. Here we have used rough approximations to approximate the fire region, and to manage the incompleteness of the knowledge base, due to absence of any prior information. Utility maximization of Q-learning has been used to minimize ambiguities in the rough approximations. The new set approximation method, thus developed here, is named as Q-rough set. It is used for fire region segmentation from video frames. The threat index of fire flame over the input video stream has been defined in sync with the relative growth in the fire segments on the recent frames. All theories and indices defined here have been experimentally validated with different types of fire videos, through demonstrations and comparisons, as superior to the state of the art.