AI Thermal Anomaly Detection
Catch abnormal heat before it becomes downtime or fire
AVIAN turns continuous thermal imaging into an early-warning workflow. The system learns what normal heat looks like, filters routine activity, and alerts your team when a bearing, belt, panel, motor, or material zone starts moving the wrong way.
Detect
Alert
Verify
Act
Document
380°F
hotspot Sierra Pacific Industries could see in thermal before smoke or visible flame appeared in the RGB view.
Why it matters
Heat problems rarely start as obvious emergencies
Most industrial failures give off heat before they give off smoke, flame, vibration, or a shutdown alarm. The hard part is seeing the right heat signal continuously, without paging the team every time a forklift or welder crosses the scene.
Manual thermal rounds only capture a moment in time, often days or weeks apart.
Fixed thresholds can miss slow drift on assets that normally run warm.
Visible-light cameras show context, but they do not measure surface temperature.
Smoke and flame detection usually enters later in the event timeline.
How AVIAN works
Thermal intelligence built for real industrial scenes
AVIAN combines thermal capture, RGB context, zone-based monitoring, adaptive baselines, and smart alarm filtering so teams see useful anomalies instead of raw camera noise.
Thermal and RGB context
Operators see the heat signature and the visible scene together, so a hotspot is tied to the asset, belt edge, pile, panel, or process area that needs attention.
Baseline-aware detection
The system tracks normal thermal behavior for each monitored zone and flags sustained drift instead of relying only on a generic temperature limit.
Noise filtering
AVIAN filters routine industrial triggers such as forklifts, loaders, welding sparks, and hot work so alerts stay focused on events that deserve a response.
From signal to response
An anomaly only matters if the right person can act on it
The goal is not another dashboard. The goal is a clear handoff from detected heat to inspection, escalation, shutdown logic, or planned maintenance.
Detect
Spot thermal drift
AVIAN watches each zone continuously and identifies abnormal heat patterns on critical assets.
Alert
Reach the right team
Alerts can go to operators, supervisors, maintenance, and on-call teams through the channels they already use.
Verify
Check the live view
Thermal and RGB views help the team confirm whether the heat source is a bearing, belt, dust pocket, panel, or process condition.
Act
Move before failure
Teams can inspect, clean, stop equipment, escalate fire response, or schedule work while the fix is still routine.
Where it applies
Built around the assets where heat changes the outcome
Sawmills and planer mills
Catch planer heat, bearing drift, roll failures, and dust system hotspots before they turn into fire or lost production.
Recycling and waste
Watch battery events, smoldering loads, conveyor heat, and after-hours hotspots before smoke or sprinklers enter the story.
Biomass and pellet plants
Track friction heat around presses, conveyors, drives, and combustible dust zones.
Mining conveyors
Monitor remote conveyor runs, transfer points, idlers, and drives where manual checks are hard to time.
Proof from the field
Named examples where thermal visibility changed the response
The strongest proof for anomaly detection is not an abstract AI claim. It is an operator seeing heat early enough to intervene.
I can be anywhere in the mill, or even sitting at home
Sierra Pacific Industries uses AVIAN alerts so maintenance leaders can see and act on thermal events without standing beside the asset.
John Brummel, Sierra Pacific Industries
Read moreAt Sierra Pacific Industries' Lincoln facility, thermal revealed a 380°F hotspot buried under dust while the RGB view still looked normal.
Sierra Pacific Lincoln facility
Read moreSchilliger Holz helped turn AVIAN from a concept into an industrial fire prevention system built around real mill conditions.
Schilliger Holz origin story
Read moreFAQ
Questions teams ask before they deploy AVIAN
Is AI thermal anomaly detection the same as predictive maintenance?
It is one practical input for predictive maintenance. AVIAN detects abnormal heat trends on monitored assets, then maintenance teams use that signal to inspect, schedule work, and prevent repeat failures before downtime or fire risk escalates.
Does AVIAN replace smoke detectors or flame detectors?
No. Smoke and flame detectors still matter for life safety and code-required fire detection. AVIAN watches an earlier stage of the event timeline: abnormal surface heat, friction, electrical faults, and process heat before smoke or flame appears.
Does anomaly detection require a new control system?
No. Operators can use AVIAN through a browser, phone, tablet, alerts, and reports. Sites that want automated response can integrate alerts into existing controls, but the anomaly detection workflow does not require a new SCADA workstation.
What kinds of anomalies does AVIAN detect?
Common examples include hot bearings, dragging conveyor belts, overheated motors, loose electrical connections, dust extraction heat, battery and charger heat, and equipment that drifts away from its normal thermal baseline.
Condition-Based Monitoring With Thermal Imaging
A practical guide to using thermal data as an early maintenance and fire-risk signal.
Forklift Filtering and Nuisance Alarms
How AVIAN separates routine industrial movement from events that need action.
AVIAN T100 Thermal Monitoring
The fixed thermal camera system behind AVIAN anomaly detection and alerts.