HearFire

Abstract

Indoor conflagration causes a large number of casualties and property losses worldwide every year. Yet existing indoor fire detection systems either suffer from short sensing range (e.g., ≤ 0.5m using a thermometer), susceptible to interferences (e.g., smoke detector) or high computational and deployment overhead (e.g., cameras, Wi-Fi). This paper proposes HearFire, a cost-effective, easy-to-use and timely room-scale fire detection system via acoustic sensing. HearFire consists of a collocated commodity speaker and microphone pair, which remotely senses fire by emitting inaudible sound waves. Unlike existing works that use signal reflection effect to fulfill acoustic sensing tasks, HearFire leverages sound absorption and sound speed variations to sense the fire due to unique physical properties of flame. Through a deep analysis of sound transmission, HearFire effectively achieves room-scale sensing by correlating the relationship between the transmission signal length and sensing distance. The transmission frame is carefully selected to expand sensing range and balance a series of practical factors that impact the system's performance. We further design a simple yet effective approach to remove the environmental interference caused by signal reflection by conducting a deep investigation into channel differences between sound reflection and sound absorption. Specifically, sound reflection results in a much more stable pattern in terms of signal energy than sound absorption, which can be exploited to differentiate the channel measurements caused by fire from other interferences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HireFire enables a maximum 7m sensing range and achieves timely fire detection in indoor environments with up to 99.2% accuracy under different experiment configurations.