Fire extinguisher presence detection via OpenMV automatic inspection

Whether fire extinguishers are in place often remains undetected until they are actually needed—by which time it is already too late. Relying on manual inspections results in low frequency and high risk of omissions, making sustained effectiveness difficult to achieve. OpenMV transforms fire safety inspections into an “always-on” process through vision-based technology.

In public and industrial venues such as shopping malls, industrial parks, factory workshops, and office buildings, the compliance placement of fire extinguishers, whether they have been moved arbitrarily, and whether they are obstructed by debris directly affect emergency response efficiency during unexpected fire incidents. The absence of fire extinguishers or inability to access them immediately often results in missing the critical window for initial firefighting, leading to greater safety losses.

Traditional fire inspection primarily relies on manual periodic checks, which not only limits inspection frequency but also heavily depends on inspectors’ sense of responsibility and experience, making omissions, misjudgments, or situations where “inspections pass but equipment is subsequently removed” prone to occur, thus hindering continuous and effective supervision.

The integration of SingTown’s OpenMV smart camera upgrades fire extinguisher inspections from manual patrols to round-the-clock automated visual inspections.

The camera is permanently installed at the designated location corresponding to fire-fighting equipment and operates stably over the long term to continuously capture on-site images of the fire extinguisher area without human intervention. OpenMV runs object detection algorithms on the camera’s edge device to accurately identify the fire extinguisher itself and, in conjunction with pre-defined installation zone rules, determines whether it is positioned as required. Additionally, through integrity assessment and occlusion detection, the system identifies whether the fire extinguisher is obstructed, toppled, or exhibits abnormal appearance, thereby evaluating its operational readiness from multiple dimensions.

Once OpenMV detects anomalies such as missing fire extinguishers, positional deviations, or obstructions, it can immediately generate an alert signal at the edge side, trigger on-site audible and visual alarm devices, or upload event information to the management platform—achieving true “immediate anomaly detection and instant issue notification.”

Leveraging an edge deployment architecture and on-device AI capabilities, OpenMV can perform recognition and judgment without continuously uploading video streams—reducing network and storage costs while significantly enhancing system stability and response speed.

Fire inspection has thus been upgraded from “periodic manual inspections” to “7×24-hour online monitoring,” effectively reducing fire safety risks and enhancing overall emergency response capabilities.