Real-Time Classification of Water Spray and Leaks for Robotic Firefighting

Abstract

Robotic firefighting is an area of increased focus as a way of limiting the exposure of firefighters to hazardous environments. A suppression system must incorporate multiple functionalities to allow for closed-loop firefighting control. One area of development is classifying water spray as a way of correcting errors between suppressant placement and fire location. An IR vision system is presented which is capable of identifying water. Image segmentation is performed, followed by a process that classifies regions of interest as water or non-water objects. A probabilistic classification method, using Naïve Bayes classifier, was applied on a varied dataset of differing water temperatures and sprays. Objects were segmented using frame differencing with image intensity and difference thresholds. Segments were manually labeled to create a training dataset. Precision, recall, F-measure, and G-measure results of the classifier on a separate test dataset ranged from 86.1-97.4% for classifying water objects using the test dataset with water classification alone having 94.2-97.4% accuracy.