Detection of smoke from infrared image frames in the aircraft cargoes

The existing equipment of civil aircraft cargo fire detection mainly uses photoelectric smoke detectors, which has a high false alarm rate. According to Federal Aviation Agency’s statistics, the false alarm rate is as high as 99%. Since, in the cargo of civil aircraft, visible image processing technology cannot be used to detect smoke in the event of a fire due to the closed dark environment, a novel smoke detection method using infrared image processing technology is presented. Experiments were conducted under different environment pressures in the full-size cargo of civil aircraft. The results show that the proposed method can effectively detect smoke at the early stage of fire which is applicable for fire detection in civil aircraft cargoes.