Deep learning with ensemble approach for early pile fire detection using aerial images

Wildfires rank among the world's most devastating and expensive natural disasters, destroying vast forest resources and endangering lives. Traditional firefighting methods, reliant on ground crew inspections, have notable limitations and pose significant risks to firefighters. Consequently, drone-based aerial imaging technologies have emerged as a highly sought-after solution for combating wildfires. Recently, there has been growing research interest in autonomous wildfire detection using drone-captured images and deep-learning algorithms. This paper introduces a novel deep-learning-based method, distinct in its integration of infrared thermal, white, and night vision imaging to enhance early pile fire detection, thereby addressing the limitations of existing methods. The study evaluates the performance of machine learning algorithms such as random forest (RF) and support vector machines (SVM), alongside pre-trained deep learning models including AlexNet, Inception ResNetV2, InceptionV3, VGG16, and ResNet50V2 on thermal-hot, green-hot, and white-green-hot color images. The proposed approach, particularly the ensemble of ResNet50V2 and InceptionV3 models, achieved over 97% accuracy and over 99% precision in early pile fire detection on the FLAME dataset. Among the tested models, ResNet50V2 excelled with the thermal-fusion palette, InceptionV3 with the white-hot and green-hot fusion palettes, and VGG16 with a voting classifier on the normal spectrum palette dataset. Future work aims to enhance the detection and localization of pile fires to aid firefighters in rescue operations.