The AI-powered Fire Sentinel system developed by China Telecom Corporation Limited (China Telecom) has issued early warnings for 271 actual fire incidents. It is employed by 18,000 enterprises, accessing more than 300,000 video monitoring channels, and has a near-perfect accuracy rate for single fire detection.
These numbers are strong evidence of the system’s ability to ensure industrial and public safety.
In early May, a fire suddenly broke out in a factory in Fuyang District of Hangzhou, the capital of East China’s Zhejiang Province, when no staff was on-site. Using advanced AI fire detection algorithms, the Fire Sentinel system instantly detected the flames and smoke. After being verified by China Telecom’s 114 service platform staff, the fire alarm was sent to firefighters — the entire process took a mere 39 seconds. Early warnings were simultaneously delivered to nearby fire stations and the enterprise’s safety manager, who immediately dialed 119 (emergency services) and alerted employees who lived nearby. Firefighters responded and extinguished the fire in 10 minutes.
This rapid emergency response is not an isolated case. At 5:09 am on July 1, smoke emerged in another factory in Ninghai County of Ningbo City, Zhejiang. In this incident, it took only 40 seconds to complete AI fire detection and manual review. The alert was disseminated through multiple channels, including text messages and AI voice calls. On-site employees extinguished the fire with firefighting equipment within minutes. The factory manager noted that the incident could have caused losses of 10 million yuan ($1.48 million) were it not for the system’s timely intervention.
The Fire Sentinel system has now achieved full coverage across all 11 prefecture-level cities in Zhejiang. Trained on 400,000 pieces of high-quality visual data for work safety, the system can detect small sparks and smoke as tiny as 0.1 square meters within 30 seconds, under various lighting and weather conditions, from clear daylight to rainy days to dark nights.
In addition, the system can utilize enterprises’ monitoring devices in a low-cost manner. Without large-scale retrofit, it can easily maintain round-the-clock, full-coverage supervision.
(Executive editor: Zuo Shihan)
