Vi-Net: A Hybrid Semantic Segmentation Approach for Enhanced Wildfire Spread Prediction

In response to the growing incidence and severity of wildfires, this paper presents Vi-Net, a novel hybrid deep learning framework for next-day wildfire spread prediction. By integrating U-Net’s fine-grained spatial segmentation with the global contextual modeling of Vision Transformers (ViT), Vi-Net formulates wildfire spread prediction as a semantic segmentation task. The model is trained on a decade-long (2012–2020) multimodal wildfire dataset that integrates meteorological, topographical, and vegetation features. To address the severe class imbalance inherent in wildfire data, Vi-Net employs a Focal Tversky loss function. Experimental results show that Vi-Net achieves an F1-score of ∼97% and an Intersection over Union (IoU) of ∼94% on test data, significantly outperforming standalone U-Net and ViT models. These findings underscore Vi-Net’s potential to improve wildfire mitigation planning, resource allocation, and emergency response.