Flame monitoring with an AER color vision sensor

We present a new method to sense NIR (Near Infrared Radiation) with an asynchronous pixel event AER (Address Event Representation) color vision sensor. The sensor´s asynchronous output data flow can be processed by a computer to monitor oscillations of NIR illumination levels. Such variations can be indicators for fires or flames. The new sensor is an alternative to high-speed CMOS cameras with NIR filters as front-end for flame detection and characterization methods. Our sensor maintains a high temporal resolution and low latency for regions that are bright in the NIR spectrum, e.g. flames and hot-spots, at an overall low (scene dependent) data rate and power consumption. This makes it specially suitable for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). A dedicated real-time Java interface was programmed to process the sensor outputs. In this paper, we describe the algorithm for sensing NIR intensity and describe experiments that show oscillations of NIR levels of a flame.