FSNet: Enhancing Forest-Fire and Smoke Detection with an Advanced UAV-Based Network

Forest fires represent a significant menace to both the ecological equilibrium of forests and the safety of human life and property. Upon ignition, fires frequently generate billowing smoke. The prompt identification and management of fire sources and smoke can efficiently avert the occurrence of extensive forest fires, thereby safeguarding both forest resources and human well-being. Although drone patrols have emerged as a primary method for forest-fire prevention, the unique characteristics of forest-fire images captured from high altitudes present challenges. These include remote distances, small fire points, smoke targets with light hues, and complex, ever-changing background environments. Consequently, traditional target-detection networks frequently exhibit diminished accuracy when handling such images. In this study, we introduce a cutting-edge drone-based network designed for the detection of forest fires and smoke, named FSNet. To begin, FSNet employs the YOCO data-augmentation method to enhance image processing, thereby augmenting both local and overall diversity within forest-fire images. Next, building upon the transformer framework, we introduce the EBblock attention module. Within this module, we introduce the notion of “groups”, maximizing the utilization of the interplay between patch tokens and groups to compute the attention map. This approach facilitates the extraction of correlations among patch tokens, between patch tokens and groups, and among groups. This approach enables the comprehensive feature extraction of fire points and smoke within the image, minimizing background interference. Across the four stages of the EBblock, we leverage a feature pyramid to integrate the outputs from each stage, thereby mitigating the loss of small target features. Simultaneously, we introduce a tailored loss function, denoted as Lforest, specifically designed for FSNet. This ensures the model’s ability to learn effectively and produce high-quality prediction boxes. We assess the performance of the FSNet model across three publicly available forest-fire datasets, utilizing mAP, Recall, and FPS as evaluation metrics. The outcomes reveal that FSNet achieves remarkable results: on the Flame, Corsican, and D-Fire datasets, it attains mAP scores of 97.2%, 87.5%, and 94.3%, respectively, with Recall rates of 93.9%, 87.3%, and 90.8%, respectively, and FPS values of 91.2, 90.7, and 92.6, respectively. Furthermore, extensive comparative and ablation experiments validate the superior performance of the FSNet model.