acreFree (Automatic Wildfire Detection System)
Wildfires have burned through 3.7 million acres this year in California and pose a constant threat to millions of people, requiring reliable and accurate fire detection methods. Currently, fire detection personnel observe many monitoring cameras day and night to find potential fires, which requires a large amount of employees and leads to fatigue. acreFree has come up with a solution to the problem. Many of these cameras do not have infrared capabilities and are unable to find fires without a person manning them, allowing some fires to go undetected and grow rapidly. Implementing automation allows for 24-hour monitoring without intensive human intervention and the ability to increase the monitored areas of interest just by installing additional automatic devices. acreFree will automatically detect potential fires and quickly send the detected images to personnel as they occur, greatly reducing the amount of camera feeds that need to be constantly monitored. acreFree will begin by designing and building a few devices that each have a camera, an array of sensors, and on-board image processing capability that can determine whether there is a wildfire, and connecting these devices to a network. If a potential fire is detected, the device will send the image and notification to a through the Internet and display the information on a wildfire monitoring webpage where personnel can review the information for decision making. Using our proposed automatic device automatic wildfire detection system and network infrastructure, future deployments can scale to utilize hundreds of cameras with 24-hour monitoring over large areas of interest using less personnel who can spend more time on decision making than watching camera feeds needed in traditional systems.