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 Fire & Emergency Services


DetectiumFire: AComprehensive Multi-modal Dataset Bridging Vision and Language for Fire Understanding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advances in multi-modal models have demonstrated strong performance in tasks such as image generation and reasoning. However, applying these models to the fire domain remains challenging due to the lack of publicly available datasets with high-quality fire domain annotations. To address this gap, we introduce DetectiumFire, a large-scale, multi-modal dataset comprising of 22.5k high-resolution fire-related images and 2.5k real-world fire-related videos covering a wide range of fire types, environments, and risk levels. The data are annotated with both traditional computer vision labels (e.g., bounding boxes) and detailed textual prompts describing the scene, enabling applications such as synthetic data generation and fire risk reasoning. DetectiumFire offers clear advantages over existing benchmarks in scale, diversity, and data quality, significantly reducing redundancy and enhancing coverage of real-world scenarios. We validate the utility of DetectiumFire across multiple tasks, including object detection, diffusion-based image generation, and vision-language reasoning. Our results highlight the potential of this dataset to advance fire-related research and support the development of intelligent safety systems. We release DetectiumFire to promote broader exploration of fire understanding in the AI community.


Fire360: ABenchmark for Robust Perception and Episodic Memory in Degraded 360 Firefighting Video

Neural Information Processing Systems

Modern AI systems struggle most in environments where reliability is criticalscenes with smoke, poor visibility, and structural deformation. Each year, tens of thousands of firefighters are injured on duty, often due to breakdowns in situational perception [35]. We introduce Fire360, a benchmark for evaluating perception and reasoning in safety-critical firefighting scenarios. The dataset includes 228 360 videos from professional training sessions under diverse conditions (e.g., low light, thermal distortion), annotated with action segments, object locations, and degradation metadata. Fire360 supports five tasks: Visual Question Answering, Temporal Action Captioning, Object Localization, Safety-Critical Reasoning, and Transformed Object Retrieval (TOR). TOR tests whether models can match pristine exemplars to fire-damaged counterparts in unpaired scenes, evaluating episodic memory under irreversible visual transformations. While human experts achieve 83.5% on TOR, models like GPT-4o lag significantly, exposing failures in reasoning under degradation. By releasing Fire360 and its evaluation suite, we aim to advance models that not only see, but also remember, reason, and act under uncertainty.


Fire360: A Benchmark for Robust Perception and Episodic Memory in Degraded 360 Firefighting Video

Neural Information Processing Systems

Modern AI systems struggle most in environments where reliability is critical - scenes with smoke, poor visibility, and structural deformation. Each year, tens of thousands of firefighters are injured on duty, often due to breakdowns in situational perception. We introduce Fire360, a benchmark for evaluating perception and reasoning in safety-critical firefighting scenarios. The dataset includes 228 360 videos from professional training sessions under diverse conditions (e.g., low light, thermal distortion), annotated with action segments, object locations, and degradation metadata. Fire360 supports five tasks: Visual Question Answering, Temporal Action Captioning, Object Localization, Safety-Critical Reasoning, and Transformed Object Retrieval (TOR). TOR tests whether models can match pristine exemplars to fire-damaged counterparts in unpaired scenes, evaluating episodic memory under irreversible visual transformations. While human experts achieve 83.5% on TOR, models like GPT-4o lag significantly, exposing failures in reasoning under degradation. By releasing Fire360 and its evaluation suite, we aim to advance models that not only see, but also remember, reason, and act under uncertainty.


Trial begins for man accused of sparking Palisades Fire in California

Al Jazeera

Federal prosecutors in the United States have accused 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht of deliberately starting the Palisades Fire, which grew into one of the most destructive in the history of Los Angeles, California. Opening statements were presented on Wednesday in Rinderknecht's federal trial, where he stands accused of destroying property by means of fire, committing arson affecting interstate commerce, and lighting timber aflame. While prosecutors portrayed him as an arsonist who premeditated his crime, defence lawyers argued there was no proof that he had ignited the blazes. If anything, they said, Rinderknecht had tried to stop them. "When all the evidence is in, there will be one thing missing: proof that Jonathan Rinderknecht started that fire on January 1," lawyer Steve Haney told jurors.


Emergency First Responders Say Waymos Are Getting Worse

WIRED

"I believe the technology was deployed too quickly in too vast amounts, with hundreds of vehicles, when it wasn't really ready," one police official told federal regulators last month. Emergency first-responder leaders told federal regulators in a private meeting last month that they were frustrated with the performance of autonomous vehicles on their streets--that city firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and paramedics are forced to spend time during emergencies resolving issues with frozen or stuck cars. One fire official called them "a safety issue for our crews as well as the victims." WIRED obtained an audio recording of the meeting. Officials from San Francisco and Austin, where Waymo has been ferrying passengers without drivers for more than a year, said the vehicles' performance is getting worse.


Fire erupts at Dubai airport following drone attack

Al Jazeera

Could Iran be using China's BeiDou system? Footage shows a fire burning near Dubai International Airport after a drone ignited a fuel tank, according to authorities in the UAE. Civil defence crews say the blaze is under control. What is force majeure and why are some Gulf countries invoking it?


Autonomous firefighting robot can drive straight into a 1,000 degree blaze

Popular Science

The tank-like vehicle is already being tested in South Korea. The robot sprays itself with water to stay cool and uses thermal cameras to see through smoke. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Firefighters in South Korea will soon start deploying alongside a massive, six-wheeled, self-cooling autonomous robot that could help keep them safe. Hyundai recently revealed the new, driverless ground drone, built atop a chassis initially intended for military use and looking like something out of a sci-fi film.


2,500-year-old settlement found during fire station construction

Popular Science

The tree cover marks the course of the source stream, which formed the basis for the construction of the former farmstead. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. While a recent Iron Age discovery in northern Germany is proving itself an archaeological goldmine, local firefighters might be a bit annoyed by the find. According to the Regional Association of Westphalia-Lippe (LWL), construction on a new fire station in the town of Hüllhorst roughly 45 miles west of Hanover was delayed after the surveyors identified evidence of a settlement dating back over 2,500 years. As only the third such find in the region, the site offers an exceptional opportunity to learn more about ancient life in Germany prior to the Roman Empire's arrival in 1st century BCE.


VastTrack: Vast Category Visual Object Tracking

Neural Information Processing Systems

V astTrack consists of a few attractive properties: (1) V ast Object Category . In particular, it covers targets from 2,115 categories, significantly surpassing object classes of existing popular benchmarks ( e.g ., GOT -10k with 563 classes and LaSOT with 70 categories). Through providing such vast object classes, we expect to learn more general object tracking.


Greece biscuit factory fire leaves at least three dead

BBC News

At least three people have been killed and two others are still missing after a fire broke out at a food factory near the central Greek city of Trikala, officials say. The blaze began in the early hours of Monday at a Violanta biscuit factory, where 13 workers were on site, according to local media. Eight people managed to escape, while firefighters later recovered three bodies from the building. Drone footage showed thick smoke billowing from the fire. A powerful explosion was reportedly heard before it broke out but an investigation into the cause of the blaze is ongoing.