Patent · US Expired

Imaging flame detection system

US5937077A · kind A · utility

38Cited by
18References
26Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateApr 25, 1996
Grant dateAug 10, 1999
Priority date
Expiry dateApr 25, 2016

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC G)Physics
  • CPC primaryG06V20/40
  • WIPO fieldControl
  • WIPO sectorInstruments

Abstract

An imaging flame detection system for detecting flames of fires against false alarms using continuous imaging and pattern recognition of infrared (IR) images of a protected area under surveillance by the system. The system uses a Silicon (Si) Charge-Coupled-Device (CCD) array to detect the IR images, which first have passed through a wide field of view lens to establish a wide surveillance of the protected area, and have been filtered by a narrow band IR filter centered at 1,140 nm wavelength to remove false alarms originated from background sources of the protected area. Then, the system digitizes and thresholds these images into binarized images for pattern recognition to remove any remaining false alarms. To accomplish this function, this process forms blobs of suspect flames from the binarized images, extracts from these blobs characteristic parameters for statistical evaluation of the suspect blobs, matches these parameters with those stored in a system database to establish a vote for a flame or a false alarm, and then declares the suspect blob as a flame when the voting value exceeds an empirically-determined threshold. On a conclusive declaration, the system automatically a…

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.