Fire extinguisher presence detection via OpenMV automated inspection

Whether fire extinguishers are in place is often only revealed when 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 it difficult to achieve continuous and effective monitoring. OpenMV transforms fire safety inspections into an “always-on” process through visual detection.

In public and industrial premises such as shopping malls, industrial parks, factory workshops, and office buildings, the compliance of fire extinguisher placement, unauthorised relocation, and obstruction by miscellaneous items directly affects emergency response efficiency in the event of a fire. Should fire extinguishers be missing or unavailable for immediate use, the critical window for initial firefighting is often missed, resulting in greater safety losses.

Traditional fire safety inspections primarily rely on manual periodic checks, which not only limit inspection frequency but also heavily depend on inspectors’ sense of responsibility and experience, making omissions, misjudgements, or situations where “inspections are passed but equipment is subsequently removed” difficult to avoid, 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 the fire-fighting equipment, operating stably over the long term to continuously capture on-site images of the fire extinguisher area without human intervention. OpenMV runs object recognition algorithms on the camera’s edge device to accurately identify the fire extinguisher itself and, in conjunction with pre-defined installation zone rules, determine whether it is positioned as required. In addition, through shape integrity and occlusion detection, the system can also identify whether the fire extinguisher is obstructed, toppled or exhibits abnormal appearance, thereby assessing its operational readiness from multiple dimensions.

Upon detecting anomalies such as missing fire extinguishers, positional displacement, or obstruction, OpenMV can immediately generate an alert signal at the edge, triggering on-site audible and visual alarm devices or uploading the event information to the management platform, thereby achieving true “immediate anomaly detection and instant issue notification”.

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

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