An early smoke detection system based on motion estimation

Smoke detection becomes more and more attractive for the social security and commercial applications. In this paper, we present an early smoke detection system based on motion estimation, which investigates stable characteristics of smoke. For trade-off of the accuracy and computational efficiency, our system utilizes an approximate median method to extract moving blocks, and color of smoke is analyzed in order to select candidate blocks. Finally, the direction of motion vector for candidate blocks is estimated to decide whether smoke occurs. Experimental results show that our proposed warning system provides lower false detection rate of smoke before the fire burns up.