Efficient Deep Learning Framework for Fire Detection in Complex Surveillance Environment

To prevent economic, social, and ecological damage, fire detection and management at an early stage are significant yet challenging. Although computationally complex networks have been developed, attention has been largely focused on improving accuracy, rather than focusing on real-time fire detection. Hence, in this study, the authors present an efficient fire detection framework termed E-FireNet for real-time detection in a complex surveillance environment. The proposed model architecture is inspired by the VGG16 network, with significant modifications including the entire removal of Block-5 and tweaking of the convolutional layers of Block-4. This results in higher performance with a reduced number of parameters and inference time. Moreover, smaller convolutional kernels are utilized, which are particularly designed to obtain the optimal details from input images, with numerous channels to assist in feature discrimination. In E-FireNet, three steps are involved: preprocessing of collected data, detection of fires using the proposed technique, and, if there is a fire, alarms are generated and transmitted to law enforcement, healthcare, and management departments. Moreover, E-FireNet achieves 0.98 accuracy, 1 precision, 0.99 recall, and 0.99 F1-score. A comprehensive investigation of various Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models is conducted using the newly created Fire Surveillance SV-Fire dataset. The empirical results and comparison of numerous parameters establish that the proposed model shows convincing performance in terms of accuracy, model size, and execution time. © 2023 CRL Publishing. All rights reserved.