Fire and Smoke Detection using an Enhanced YOLOv8 Model

Due in part to global warming, the frequency of wildfires has increased in recent years, significantly impacting humans, wildlife, and forest ecosystems. To address this challenge, using technology for early fire detection through smoke can help firefighters and other stakeholders limit their spread and reduce the impact. In this research, we adopt the latest object detection model - YOLOv8 and use a fine-tuned version for detecting smoke and fire using the latest datasets. YOLOv8 backbone begins with two convolutional (Conv) layers, followed by a series of alternating Conv layers and C2F modules, and ends with a Spatial Pyramid Pooling - Fast (SPPF) module. Our improvement involves adding two extra Conv layers at the beginning of the backbone, between the alternating sequence of Conv and C2F layers. As the smoke and fire detection problem involves searching for smaller objects in the image, increasing the feature extraction layers improves the performance of smoke and fire detection. The fine-tuned model is tested with the FASDD v4 dataset, which depicts fire, smoke, non-fire, and non-smoke scenarios.