Comparison of two methods for estimating fire positions and the rate of spread of linear flame fronts

The aim of this paper is to compare two continuous methods for the identification of fire front positions and the rate of spread of linear flame fronts. The first technique is based on the heat fluxes measured by a specific thermal sensor and the use of the inverse method. The second one uses an image processing technique applying the simple direct linear transformation (DLT) algorithm and the fire segmentation algorithm to obtain fire front positions. The fire segmentation method has been selected by benchmarking four recently published studies and involves a supervised evaluation criterion. The two continuous approaches give closely similar results and it is shown that these two techniques can be respectively validated by each other.