[Customer Success Story] How the National Fire Research Institute Built an AI Monitoring System for Early EV Fire Detection in Underground Parking Facilities

As EV adoption expands in South Korea, where more than 750,000 EVs were registered by May 2025 and 238 EV fires had been reported through 2024, the National Fire Research Institute and Superb AI have collaborated to improve early fire detection in underground parking facilities. Their four-phase research program addresses the difficulty of identifying faint smoke from lithium-ion battery thermal runaway, especially in confined environments where delayed detection can worsen damage and firefighting access is limited. Using roughly 100,000 images from real incidents, controlled experiments, and generative-AI-created synthetic scenarios, the team trained and evaluated models specialized for smoke emerging beneath EVs rather than generic visible-fire detection. The selected model operates in real time on low-cost edge devices connected to existing CCTV systems, providing local web-based monitoring, visual and audible alerts, and event logging without requiring cloud servers. Field demonstrations and a full-scale underground smoke simulation validated the system under realistic conditions, and reported results indicate an 80% reduction in false alarms and a 65% shorter average detection time than an existing system. The final project phase focuses on deployment readiness and establishing quantitative standards such as detection distance and response time for future EV fire detection systems.

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