DigitalPath has  built a convolutional neural network to detect symptoms of fire in real time by using the sheer power of NVIDIA GPUs and supported by a network of thousands of cameras dotting the Californian countryside.

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Over the last decade, wildfires have devastated California, destroying thousands of homes and businesses and taking hundreds of lives. The overall monetary damage caused by wildfires in California from 2019 to 2021 was predicted to be more than $25 billion.

Every time a fire breaks out, a newly deployed system driven by AI trained on NVIDIA GPUs promises to provide timely notifications to first responders.

The ALERTCalifornia ,is a cooperation initiative between CAL FIRE and the University of California, San Diego, employs sophisticated AI created by DigitalPath.

DigitalPath has  built a convolutional neural network to detect symptoms of fire in real time by using the sheer power of NVIDIA GPUs and supported by a network of thousands of cameras dotting the Californian countryside.

The AI programme began in June and was first implemented in six of Cal Fire’s command centres and has now been  extended to all 21 CAL FIRE command centres.

DigitalPath began by developing a management platform for a network of cameras used to confirm wildfires in California. The business immediately realised that having individuals review photographs from the hundreds of cameras feeding data to the system every ten to fifteen seconds would be impossible. So company turned to artificial intelligence.

The researchers began by training a convolutional neural network using a cloud-based system powered by an NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU, then moved on to a system powered by eight A100 GPUs.

The AI model is critical for investigating a system that receives about 8 million photos every day from over 1,000 first-party cameras, mostly in California, and thousands more from third-party sources countrywide.

DigitalPath intends to expand its detection system to assist California in detecting other types of natural catastrophes.

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