CNTCB-YOLOv7: An Effective Forest Fire Detection Model Based on ConvNeXtV2 and CBAM

In the context of large-scale fire areas and complex forest environments, the task of identifying the subtle features and aspects of fire can pose a significant challenge for the deep learning model. As a result, to enhance the model’s ability to represent features and its precision in detection, this study initially introduces ConvNeXtV2 and Conv2Former to the You Only Look Once version 7 (YOLOv7) algorithm, separately, and then compares the results with the original YOLOv7 algorithm through experiments. After comprehensive comparison, the proposed ConvNeXtV2-YOLOv7 based on ConvNeXtV2 exhibits a superior performance in detecting forest fires. Additionally, in order to further focus the network on the crucial information in the task of detecting forest fires and minimize irrelevant background interference, the efficient layer aggregation network (ELAN) structure in the backbone network is enhanced by adding four attention mechanisms: the normalization-based attention module (NAM), simple attention mechanism (SimAM), global attention mechanism (GAM), and convolutional block attention module (CBAM). The experimental results, which demonstrate the suitability of ELAN combined with the CBAM module for forest fire detection, lead to the proposal of a new method for forest fire detection called CNTCB-YOLOv7. The CNTCB-YOLOv7 algorithm outperforms the YOLOv7 algorithm, with an increase in accuracy of 2.39%, recall rate of 0.73%, and average precision (AP) of 1.14%.