Exploring A CAM-Based Approach for Weakly Supervised Fire Detection Task

Most existing works in fire detection literature use available detectors like Faster RCNN, SSD, YOLO, etc. to localize the fire in images. These approaches work well but require object-level annotation for training, which is created manually and is very expensive. In this paper, we explore the weakly supervised fire detection task (WSFD) in which only the image-level annotation is given. We propose an approach based on class activation map (CAM). The CAM-based approach firstly trains a deep neural network as the classifier for identifying fire and non-fire images. For a fire image in the inference stage, it uses the classifier to create a CAM and then further generates the bounding boxes according to the CAM. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we collect and construct a benchmark dataset named WS-FireNet and conduct comprehensive experiments on it. The experiment results show that in a way the performance of our approach is satisfactory.