Mining and Classifying Image Posts on Social Media to Analyse Fires

We propose a methodology to study the occurrence of fires through image posts on Flickr; crowd-sourcing information from a noisy social media dataset can estimate the presence of fires. We collect several years worth of photos and associated metadata using fire-related search terms. We use an image classification model to detect geotagged photos that are further analysed to determine if a fire event did occur at a particular time and place. Furthermore, a case study investigates image features and spatio-temporal elements in the metadata, as well as location information contained in camera EXIF data.