California uses AI to monitor wildfires: 1,032 cameras are connected to the Internet to scan for forest anomalies

IT Home News on August 13, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) recently announced a new project that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to detect forest fires. The project, developed in partnership with the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and called "Alert California AI," uses video signals from 1,032 360-degree rotating cameras to use AI to "identify anomalies in the camera footage." Once a potential fire is detected, emergency services and other relevant authorities are notified to determine whether response measures are required.

The project started in July and, according to Reuters, has successfully extinguished at least one potential fire. It is reported that in the incident, a camera captured the first flames at 3 a.m. in the remote Cleveland National Forest east of San Diego. AI immediately discovered the fire and notified a fire chief, who summoned approximately 60 firefighters, including 7 fire trucks, 2 bulldozers, 2 water tankers and 2 work teams, and the fire was brought under control within 45 minutes. put out.

A small sample of the 1,032 live camera feeds used by Cal Fire, 9 frames can be seen showing forest and desert scenes in different parts of California

The "Alert California AI" technology website says they use lidar (LiDAR) scans from aircraft and drones to generate "three-dimensional information about the scanned surface." Physical characteristics of tree species are combined to understand California forest biomass and carbon content. Cal Fire says machine learning (ML) models leverage petabytes (1PB = 1,000TB) of camera data to differentiate between smoke and other air particles.

The system was developed by UCSD engineers using AI provided by California company DigitalPath. Cal Fire has invested more than $20 million (IT Home Note: currently about 145 million yuan) in the project over the past four years. , and promised to invest another US$3.516 million (currently approximately 25.456 million yuan) in the near future.

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