Attention-driven YOLOv5 for wildfire smoke detection from camera images

Wildfires are serious hazards for the environment, and WFSD (Wildfire Smoke Detection) is a challenge for ensuring optimal response and mitigation efforts. Hence, this study suggests an attention-based YOLOv5 (You Only Look Once) network for detecting smoke instances within video frames, particularly ECA (Efficient Channel Attention), GAM (Global Attention Module) and CA (Coordinate Attention). Here, an open-source wildfire smoke dataset divided into train, validation and test set is used for experimentation. The comprehensive research and evaluations show that the incorporation of attention mechanisms successfully enhances the accuracy and robustness of the YOLOv5 model for WFSD. In the training among the attention modules, GAM appears as the most effective, attaining an improved 95% F1 score on the dataset. This research provides the impact of attention mechanisms on object detection in the context of wildfire smoke. The findings of the research paper contribute to improving the capabilities of deep learning models for emergency response and environmental monitoring. The proposed methodology not only outperforms regular YOLOv5 but also sets up a benchmark for future research of WFSD.