Advancing Maritime Safety: Early Detection of Ship Fires through Computer Vision, Deep Learning Approaches, and Histogram Equalization Techniques

The maritime sector confronts an escalating challenge with the emergence of onboard fires aboard in ships, evidenced by a pronounced uptick in incidents in recent years. The ramifications of such fires transcend immediate safety apprehensions, precipitating repercussions that resonate on a global scale. This study underscores the paramount importance of ship fire detection as a proactive measure to mitigate risks and fortify maritime safety comprehensively. Initially, we created and labeled a custom ship dataset. The collected images are varied in their size, like having high- and low-resolution images in the dataset. Then, by leveraging the YOLO (You Only Look Once) object detection algorithm we developed an efficacious and accurate ship fire detection model for discerning the presence of fires aboard vessels navigating marine routes. The ship fire detection model was trained on 50 epochs with more than 25,000 images. The histogram equalization (HE) technique was also applied to avoid destruction from water vapor and to increase object detection. After training, images of ships were input into the inference model after HE, to be categorized into two classes. Empirical findings gleaned from the proposed methodology attest to the model’s exceptional efficacy, with the highest detection accuracy attaining a noteworthy 0.99% across both fire-afflicted and non-fire scenarios.