Reduction of Misclassifications in Wildfire Detection: A Weighted Ensemble Deep Learning Approach

Governments worldwide are increasingly prioritizing early wildfire detection to safeguard lives, property, and the environment. Although CNN-based models have demonstrated exceptional performance in various computer vision applications, the evolving nature of wildfire images poses significant challenges for a single CNN-based model in wildfire detection. In this study, we addressed this issue by integrating and weighting the differential learning capabilities of three individual transfer learning models: InceptionV3, ResNet50, and VGG16. Experimental results show that the ensemble deep learning models significantly outperformed all single classifiers across all performance metrics. Both the ensemble and weighted ensemble deep learning models achieved 99.7% accuracy, 99.5% precision, 100% recall, 99.8% F1-score, 0.5%false positive rate, 0.0% false negative rate and 0.3% error rate. Additionally, these models reduced the error rate by 98%, 91%, and 40% compared to the error rates of ResNet50, InceptionV3, and VGG16 respectively. A false negative rate of 0% indicates that our proposed ensemble deep learning models identified and predicted all the wildfire instances present in the test set correctly without a single misclassification. This positions our proposed ensemble deep learning models as superior choices for reducing misclassifications in wildfire detection.