A real-time deep learning forest fire monitoring algorithm based on an improved Pruned + KD model

To meet the needs of embedded intelligent forest fire monitoring systems using an unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), a deep learning fire recognition algorithm based on model compression and lightweight requirements is proposed in this study. The algorithm for the lightweight MobileNetV3 model was developed to reduce the complexity of the conventional YOLOv4 network structure. The redundant channels are eliminated through channel-level sparsity-induced regularization. The knowledge distillation algorithm is used to improve the detection accuracy of the pruned model. The experimental results reveal that the number of model parameters for the proposed architecture is only 2.64 million—compared with YOLOv4, this represents a reduction of nearly 95.87%. The inference time decreased from 153.8 to 37.4 ms, a reduction of nearly 75.68%. Our approach shows the advantages of a model with a smaller number of parameters, low memory requirements and fast inference speed compared with existing algorithms. The method presented in this paper is specifically tailored for use as a deep learning forest fire monitoring system on a UAV platform.