Our visual detection is an expert system that detects smoke based on rules. These rules are defined by our experienced computer vision engineers. The rules describe the wildfire smoke: color, shape, size, motion, changes and change rates, etc.
Rule-based systems are deterministic in nature. Not having the right rule in place can result in false positives and false negatives. As we support more customers in more countries, we will update our rules to cover new scenarios. It takes time to learn a new environment and to become an expert.
Wildfires in different countries are different. The background cloud movement, cloud shadows, chimney smoke, tree vibrations, and sunlight reflection of bright surfaces, etc.
We need a more efficient way to optimize our detection for a new deployment than updating hundreds of rules. We believe we can make more effective use of our experience and knowledge.
What is our AI smoke detection?
We use Machine Learning (ML) to build our next-generation AI smoke detection. ML is probabilistic and uses statistical models rather than deterministic rules.3