DeepFire: A Novel Dataset and Deep Transfer Learning Benchmark for Forest Fire Detection

Forest fires pose a potential threat to the ecological and environmental systems and natural resources, impacting human lives. However, automated surveillance system for early forest fire detection can mitigate such calamities and protect the environment. Therefore, we propose a UAV-based forest fire fighting system with integrated artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for continuous forest surveillance and fire detection. The major contributions of the proposed research are fourfold. Firstly, we explain the detailed working mechanism along with the key steps involved in executing the UAV-based forest fire fighting system. Besides, a robust forest fire detection system requires precise and efficient classification of forest fire imagery against no-fire. Moreover, we have curated a novel dataset (DeepFire) containing diversified real-world forest imagery with and without fire to assist future research in this domain. The DeepFire dataset consists of 1900 colored images with 950 each for fire and no-fire classes. Next, we investigate the performance of various supervised machine learning classifiers for the binary classification problem of detecting forest fire. Furthermore, we propose a VGG19-based transfer learning solution to achieve improved prediction accuracy. We assess and compare the performance of several machine learning approaches such as k-nearest neighbors, random forest, naive Bayes, support vector machine, logistic regression, and the proposed approach for accurately identifying fire and no-fire images in the DeepFire dataset. The simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach in terms of accurate classification, where it achieves the mean accuracy of 95% with 95.7% precision and 94.2% recall.