ZERO INFRASTRUCTURE GEOLOCATION OF NEARBY FIRST RESPONDERS ON RO-RO VESSELS

Abstract

The early suppression of fires on ro-ro vessels requires rapid fire identification as a fire of medium growth exponentially reaches 50kW after only 1 minute. Fire patrol members (e.g., able seamen) are asked to act as first responders in such fire incident cases. They do however lack the necessary digital technology for immediate localization, verification and coordination with the bridge and other first responders. Indoor localization requires dense referencing systems (such as Wi-Fi, UWB, Bluetooth antennas), but these technologies require expensive installations and maintenance. Also, Satellite-based indoor localization is obstructed by the bulky steel structures of vessels, so this doesn’t work either. Within the LASH FIRE project, an H2020 funded project (Grant Agreement #814975) in which this publication is framed, research has been carried out to develop a ground-breaking localization technology that requires zero infrastructure using computer vision on commodity smartphone devices attached to the gear of first responders. The developed solution comprises of three steps: (i) Training, where vessel owners supply video recordings that are processed on a deep learning data center to produce an accurate computer vision machine learning model; (ii) Logging, where a mobile app allows referencing non-movable objects to the (x,y,deck) coordinates of a vessel; and (iii) Localization, where first responders localize on a digital map. Additionally, in case a sparse communication network is available, first responders can share their location, emergency messages and heat scan images with nearby first responders and the bridge. Our proposed technology is shown to be 80% and 90% accurate for localization and tracking scenarios, respectively, in a study we carried out with video traces from a real ro-ro vessel. The overall developed Smart Alert System (SMAS), streamlines the lengthy fire verification, coordination, and reaction process in the early stages of a fire, improving fire safety.