Wide area fire surveillance by infrared digital signal processing

A general scheme for automatic signal detection in scanning surveillance systems is proposed. We consider the problem of deciding if there is an alarm, based on the data measured in the cell under analysis at different consecutive scanning time instants. The proposed scheme includes a linear predictor and a subspace model for the signal to be detected, in an effort to maximise the detector performance. Although it may have general applicability in scanning surveillance problems, we focus the work on the problem of wide-area uncontrolled fire detection by means of infrared radar.