Public safetyEnvironment and cleanliness
CAM-567
A column of smoke, and the two minutes that decide everything
A hill road at dusk. In the scrub, thirty feet from the shoulder, a column of smoke is rising with flame at its base: still small, the size of a bush. A car is stopped on the shoulder, one person stands next to the fire and another is crossing the road. A four-by-four with an amber beacon is coming up the road. Behind them, an information panel and a picnic table. IRIS doesn’t say how that started or who was there before: it says there’s smoke coming out of the hillside, at which point of the road and from which minute.
Turn on IRIS Vision
AI-generated image
What IRIS understands
What it recognizes in this scene
- column of smoke
- flame at the base of the fire
- person standing next to the fire
- person crossing the road
- car stopped on the shoulder
- four-by-four with an amber beacon
- road up into the hills
- information panel for the area
- picnic table
- wooden rail along the shoulder
The rule
You decide once. IRIS applies it always.
If
smoke appears in the vegetated area
Then
- raise a red alert to the control room with the road point and the image
- save the video from two minutes before the first smoke
- measure how the column grows and update the alert every minute
The instruction that set it up«Give me a red alert the moment you see smoke coming out of the hillside.»
What changes
What changes for whoever goes out, whoever decides and whoever justifies it later
In a wildfire the first two minutes decide whether this is put out with a backpack pump or whether there are aircraft in the air tomorrow. Today the alert comes by phone, from somebody who was passing, when the column is already visible from the village. With a camera watching the hillside, the alert goes out the moment there starts to be smoke, with the road marker and the image, and whoever is on call knows where to go without asking. And there’s a less epic figure that also counts: most of these alerts are closed in twenty seconds because they’re dust, mist or steam from a shed. Looking is cheap; arriving late isn’t.
What people usually ask
Does the camera say who started the fire?
No, and this is where it matters most to be explicit. IRIS sees smoke and sees that there are people nearby, and those are two separate facts that can’t be added together. A wildfire often starts from a spark, a lightning strike or a cable, and whoever is standing next to it may be the first person who saw it and stopped to put it out. The camera knows nothing about that, doesn’t insinuate it and doesn’t write it anywhere. What it does is keep the whole sequence from before there was any smoke, and that sequence serves as much to rule somebody out as to point at them. The investigating is done by a person.
Doesn’t it mistake smoke for mist or dust?
Sometimes it does, and that’s why the alert always comes with the video. Smoke from a fire rises from a point, widens and grows minute by minute; mist arrives as a band and dust from a track lifts and drops. That way of growing is what tells them apart, not the color. Even so, we don’t promise there will be no extra alerts, and any figure we gave about that couldn’t be proved. What we do say is that an alert with video is dismissed in twenty seconds, and on a hillside in August that trade is worth far more than the nuisance.
Do you have to install new cameras all over the hills?
Not necessarily. Almost every access to a natural area already has a camera for some other reason: the barrier, the parking lot, the viewpoint, the road. IRIS reads those same cameras and adds one more rule to them. New cameras go where there’s a coverage gap and where there’s a legal basis, and that’s decided by whoever manages the area. What you shouldn’t do is throw away what’s already installed to start from scratch.
Other cameras
- CAM-560 · The gate has been blocked by a stopped vehicle for eight minutes
- CAM-561 · How many people are inside the compound right now
- CAM-562 · Two cars in the lane with the red cross above it
- CAM-563 · Thirty-four minutes of waiting, and only three lanes open
- CAM-564 · Something crosses the wall from above and drops a package inside
- CAM-565 · Who went into the store, when, and what can be proved
Simulation · how IRIS works
This isn’t a video. It’s a slice of the real screen.
A summary of the real interface, played hands-free. You see one case from start to finish; what you don’t see are the other screens, and there are many.
- It lands in the tray
- You open it
- You confirm or dismiss
Next step
Who is watching when the load swings over somebody?
11 cases: 9 raise an alert when something happens and 2 only measure. You see each image as it is, and then with what IRIS understands on top.
Who is watching the yard screen when the fight starts?
17 cases: 16 raise an alert when something happens and one only measures. You see each image as it is, and then with what IRIS understands on top.
And the best part
You can’t describe a line with a sentence.You have to draw it on the image.
Asking is for finding. Counting is for measuring. And they aren’t done the same way. That’s why the number comes out the same every day, and why people counting is approved by the Centro Español de Metrología — Spain’s national metrology institute. It’s a Spanish approval and it isn’t equivalent to any U.S. certification.
Tell us your problem and we’ll say whether IRIS understands it, or not yet.
A person answers, the same working day.