Vision and Automation Solutions for Engineers and Integrators Worldwide The risk of these fires occurring has increased in recent years because of climate change and, in fact, more fires have occurred. A total of 65,660 hectares of forest and wildlands burned in France in 2022, compared with an average of 9,825 hectares from 2006-2021, according to Statista (NY, NY, USA; www.statista.com.) That is why the SDIS72, or Service Départemental d'Incendies et de Secours de la Sarthe, (Coulaines, France; www.sdis72.fr) located in the Northwest quadrant of France implemented an automated fire detection and information management system The district oversees the most densely forested region in Northwest France with 117,000 hectares of forest Before implementing an automated solution the fire department made do with a hit-or-miss strategy of human observation by a single person stationed at a height of 30 or 40 m above ground in a watchtower It was a risky undertaking for the human observers they would be exposed to the risk of lightning strikes and radiofrequency fields from nearby GSM relay antennas The automated system—Alert Detection Localization of Forest Fires, or ADELIE—was developed by PARATRONIC (Reyrieux, France; www.paratronic.com/en/) a company that specializes in developing and marketing electronic systems to manage public water systems or prevent natural disasters “The doctrine of the French fire brigade is to attack any fire in a dynamic and massive way in order to limit its development as much as possible A monitoring system such as ADELIE allows the fire brigade to be warned as soon as the first smoke appears and therefore to be alerted as soon as possible and to send correctly sized resources as quickly as possible to a perfectly located site,” says Edouard Bouillot Director of Projects and Innovation at PARATRONIC SDIS72 is one of seven French fire departments using the ADELIE system SDIS72 chose the system after a formal public tender “The capabilities and results of the ADELIE system developed over 15 years in conjunction with its users led the SDIS72 to choose the ADELIE system,” explains Bouillot ADELIE detects the presence of smoke through surveillance points that are networked together Line scan cameras and a video camera are installed at each surveillance point to confirm the presence of smoke once it is detected by the automated system The ADELIE system can integrate with any video camera and is currently using a model from Bosch. (Stuttgart, Germany; www.bosch.com/) At each surveillance point, PARATRONIC installs two detection cameras that comprise four Gigabit Ethernet cameras from IDS Imaging Development Systems GmbH (Obersulm, Germany; https://en.ids-imaging.com/) totaling eight IDS cameras per surveillance point The camera—UI-5240SE-NIR-GL from the uEye product line—is fitted with a 1.3-MPixel CMOS sensor from Teledyne e2v (Chelmsford, Essex, UK; www.teledyne-e2v.com/en/home/) Each of the surveillance points observes an area with a radius of up to 20 km taking two minutes to monitor a 360-degree radius The system works 24 hours a day and seven days a week There are 16 surveillance points in the system The system takes 13,500 images per surveillance site per day in the forested area overseen by SDIS72 and stores the images (even if smoke is not detected) for 30 days All images—even those in which fire was not detected—are transmitted over an Internet Protocol (IP) network in real time The images are available in JPEG so members of the SDIS72 team can review them on a computer monitor PARATRONIC-developed deep-learning algorithms compare two images taken at the same orientation to detect the presence of smoke the images are registered to the 50th of a degree Other algorithms carry out an automatic check to ensure that the smoke is not coming from a known source Once the analysis is complete and smoke is confirmed the images and associated data (camera number and time taken) are transmitted to a computer in the SDIS72 control center By integrating data from a weather station information such as wind speed and precipitation also are transmitted the system triggers an alarm at connected workstations located in SDIS72’s control center An operator then confirms visually the presence of a fire using the feed from the video camera and passes the information about the fire to the department’s intervention teams The operator and fire officials also can use the video to monitor the situation until firefighters arrive on the scene and then throughout the intervention control center operators use ADELIE’s supervision software to determine the exact location of the source of the fire on a digital map This is done using triangulation—a surveying method in which a specific point is located by measuring the angles to it from other known points.  “Detection in the natural environment has to face multiple technical challenges such as light the natural environment moving and changing with the seasons and the appearance or disappearance of objects the linescan camera’s sensor has two global-shutter and two rolling-shutter modes allowing for flexibility to manage changing ambient conditions such as from outdoor weather conditions and time-of-day “The camera offers the direct possibility of sequentially taking four pictures with increasing exposure time Continuous shooting makes it possible to get a very high dynamic range”" to capture more detail explains PARATRONIC Engineer Loïs Carrié Then there is the housing used for both the line scan and video cameras They are enclosed in ruggedized housing and mounted on towers tall enough to perch the cameras above the tree canopy which was designed by PARATRONIC’s R&D team “The external case is really an armor,” Bouillot says the system’s line scan camera system continues surveillance in case a second fire occurs while the team is working to extinguish the first fire the process does not end when a fire is over SDIS72 also uses the image data from the fire to improve its firefighting efforts the team might decide to modify the boundaries of certain surveillance zones the images could also be used to assist the fire cause investigations,” Bouillot says concluding that “the goal is to have a return on intervention experiences.” Linda Wilson joined the team at Vision Systems Design in 2022 She has more than 25 years of experience in B2B publishing and has written for numerous publications she was the senior editor at Medical Laboratory Observer By 2014-09-01T11:06:00+01:00 Alstom has supplied a further eight Citadis low-floor trams from its La Rochelle plant to operate services on the new line and to augment the existing fleet of 26 cars has modified the interiors of the existing fleet to reflect updated accessibility standards and feedback from passengers FRANCE: Keolis is support the development of plans to restructure the public transport network in Le Mans There are currently two tram and 22 bus routes including one BRT route which operate a total of almost 8·5 million km/year Plans include the renewal of information and .. FRANCE: Le Mans Métropole has awarded Alstom a €57m contract to extend the city’s 34 Citadis trams from 32 m to 44 m This will increase capacity by 85 passengers to 296 The project also includes updates to the CCTV and tachometric control units and the .. Société d’économie mixte des transports en commun de l’agglomération mancelle (Setram) Site powered by Webvision Cloud Young progressive local and regional politicians from all over the European Union adopted on October 12 the declaration "WANTED – New EU Housing Strategy!" This declaration calls for decisive EU action to make the right to housing for all a reality and sets out 15 concrete proposals on different aspects of housing policy Drafted at the PES Group's participatory lab on "Affordable held as part of the 2022 European Week of Regions and Cities the declaration was handed to Nicolas Schmit European Commissioner for Jobs and Social Rights President of the PES Group at the European Committee of the Regions and Mayor of Coulaines said: "We are facing a dramatic housing crisis affecting millions of people in villages We need to urgently harness all the resources of the Union to make this right a reality In addition to the considerable European funding that already exists we need to set Member States binding objectives to finance the construction and renovation of quality and energy-efficient housing With the revenue from the European tax on super-profits we will be able to support the most vulnerable members of society.” stated that "Everybody has the right to affordable housing Europe must redouble its efforts when it comes to investing in social housing before it is too late and we see even greater numbers of people with nowhere to call 'home'." more than 80 million people are currently affected by the lack of affordable and social housing in Europe 17.1% of the EU population live in overcrowded houses and 10.3% of the EU population spend more than 40% of their income on rent 47% of young Europeans between the ages of 18 and 34 are still forced to live at home with their parents Prepared according the report by Group of the Party of European Socialists in the European Committee of the Regions A subscription to The Baltic Times is a cost-effective way of staying in touch with the latest Baltic news and views enabling you full access from anywhere with an Internet connection. Subscribe Now! 2025 © The Baltic Times /Cookies Policy Privacy Policy