A Novel Method for Smart Fire Detection Using Acoustic Measurements and Machine Learning: Proof of Concept

John Martinsson, Marcus Runefors, Håkan Frantzich, Dag Glebe, Margaret McNamee, Olof Mogren

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Fires are a major hazard resulting in high monetary costs, personal suffering, and irreplaceable losses. The consequences of a fire can be mitigated by early detection systems which increase the potential for successful intervention. The number of false alarms in current systems can for some applications be very high, but could be reduced by increasing the reliability of the detection system by using complementary signals from multiple sensors. The current study investigates the novel use of machine learning for fire event detection based on acoustic sensor measurements. Many materials exposed to heat give rise to acoustic emissions during heating, pyrolysis and burning phases. Further, sound is generated by the heat flow associated with the flame itself. The acoustic data collected in this study is used to define an acoustic sound event detection task, and the proposed machine learning method is trained to detect the presence of a fire event based on the emitted acoustic signal. The method is able to detect the presence of fire events from the examined material types with an overall F-score of 98.4%. The method has been developed using laboratory scale tests as a proof of concept and needs further development using realistic scenarios in the future.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3385-3403
Number of pages19
JournalFire Technology
Volume58
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022 Nov

Subject classification (UKÄ)

  • Computer and Information Sciences
  • Civil Engineering

Free keywords

  • Acoustic emissions
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Deep neural networks
  • Fire detection
  • Machine learning
  • Sound

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