In defense against potential blazes in 2023 and beyond, the wildfire-prone West is gearing up to take on megafires using Artificial Intelligence technology. As the summer kicked-off in California, the fire-plagued state reached out to an AI tech company– Pano who seems to have a practical solution for suppressing fire at its earliest stage.
The strategy encompasses installing cameras across California’s wild landscapes and powerlines to spot fire before it grows into huge and costly inferno. Real-time intelligence insights alert fire responders and helps them quickly plan and prepare.
Other wildfire threatened states such as Washington, Nevada, Oregon and Colorado also joined the list making agreements with Pano to install wildfire detection systems across the states.
“It can detect just a wisp of smoke and it’s that type of situation in remote areas that could save forests and homes and properties and lives,” Joann Ginal, a Democratic state senator in Colorado.
How does it works?
Pano Early Detect uses 360-degree Cameras and Artificial Intelligence to spot, confirm and propagate fire severity information to first responders right at the earliest stage of ignition.
Each of these ultra HD cameras are placed at highly alleviated locations across fire-prone forests, bushlands and vegetation areas to continuously monitor for signs of smoke and flames. At the backstage, the live video stream is fed to an AI system that uses deep learning AI and computer vision to spot flames in real-time– nearly as early as the fire begins to wisp.
The demonstration of Pano’s AI capability to detect, verify and classify wildfire events in real-time at their official site shows remarkable efficiency of the underlying deep learning algorithm. It’s trained on nearly 300 million images that made it learn every look of how flames can appear in different forms and across varying terrains.
Impressively, Pano’s software also allows real-time viewing of multiple wildfire events and aids firefighters to plan and prioritize flame suppression based on the severity and proximity of events.
Once initial detection of a fire event is made, high quality, auto centered images with enhanced zoom and accurate location coordinates are automatically sent to the fire monitoring teams.
The work of Pano’s Rapid Detect isn’t finished just yet. The fire monitoring professionals, after confirming a wildfire event, can quickly disseminate alerts to first responders using Pano’s built-in communication tools that notify up-to-date information on mobile devices in real time. This includes time-lapse imagery and location information as the fire proceeds to its next stages.
Pano AI is billed as “the first disaster preparedness technology provider to offer a fully-integrated solution for active wildfire detection,”.
The Impact:
In one of history’s most devastating wildfires– Australia’s Black Summer Bushfires that started in late 2019 and entered into early 2021, traditional fire fighting failed miserably. The fire, which was only spotted after it grew in size, caused a loss of nearly billions of animals, damaging vast areas of forests, farmlands and residential areas. Firefighters fought the blazes for months to fully contain the raging inferno but only after extensive loss of nature and lives.
Pano’s Rapid Detect is certainly a significant step toward saving lives, structures, lands, and governmental resources. Cameras, AI and satellite data deliver promising results in spotting fires in real-time, alerting and preparing firefighters to reach exact location and at a time when the fire could be easily handled.
The speed of detection of fire by Pano’s software was something not possible earlier as fire alerts were mostly delivered by bystanders and reported on 911, causing costly delays in fire initial mitigation.
In result, Pano’s Rapid Detect System is also a savior of firefighters who can quickly make decisions with access to real-time information on how the fire is progressing. They can keep them safe when they know of the severity the fire can shape into.
