Detecting Wildfire Flame and Smoke through Edge Computing using Transfer Learning Enhanced Deep Learning Models

Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) integrated with edge computing capabilities empower real-time data processing directly on the device, dramatically reducing latency in critical scenarios such as wildfire detection. This study underscores Transfer Learning's (TL) significance in boosting the performance of object detectors for identifying wildfire smoke and flames, especially when trained on limited datasets, and investigates the impact TL has on edge computing metrics. With the latter focusing how TL-enhanced You Only Look Once (YOLO) models perform in terms of inference time, power usage, and energy consumption when using edge computing devices. This study utilizes the Aerial Fire and Smoke Essential (AFSE) dataset as the target, with the Flame and Smoke Detection Dataset (FASDD) and the Microsoft Common Objects in Context (COCO) dataset serving as source datasets. We explore a two-stage cascaded TL method, utilizing D-Fire or FASDD as initial stage target datasets and AFSE as the subsequent stage. Through fine-tuning, TL significantly enhances detection precision, achieving up to 79.2% mean Average Precision (mAP@0.5), reduces training time, and increases model generalizability across the AFSE dataset. However, cascaded TL yielded no notable improvements and TL alone did not benefit the edge computing metrics evaluated. Lastly, this work found that YOLOv5n remains a powerful model when lacking hardware acceleration, finding that YOLOv5n can process images nearly twice as fast as its newer counterpart, YOLO11n. Overall, the results affirm TL's role in augmenting the accuracy of object detectors while also illustrating that additional enhancements are needed to improve edge computing performance.