Fire detection in video sequences using a generic color model

In this paper, a rule-based generic color model for flame pixel classification is proposed. The proposed algorithm uses YCbCr color space to separate the luminance from the chrominance more effectively than color spaces such as RGB or rgb. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested on two sets of images, one of which contains fire, the other containing fire-like regions. The proposed method achieves up to 99% fire detection rate. The results are compared with two other methods in the literature and the proposed method is shown to have both a higher detection rate and a lower false alarm rate. Furthermore the proposed color model can be used for real-time fire detection in color video sequences, and we also present results for segmentation of fire in video using only the color model proposed in this paper. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.