Texture-Aware Network for Enhancing Inner Smoke Representation in Visual Smoke Density Estimation

Smoke often appears before visible flames in the early stages of fire disasters, making accurate pixel-wise detection essential for fire alarms. Although existing segmentation models effectively identify smoke pixels, they generally treat all pixels within a smoke region as having the same prior probability. This assumption of rigidity, common in natural object segmentation, fails to account for the inherent variability within smoke. We argue that pixels within smoke exhibit a probabilistic relationship with both smoke and background, necessitating density estimation to enhance the representation of internal structures within the smoke. To this end, we propose enhancements across the entire network. First, we improve the backbone by adaptively integrating scene information into texture features through separate paths, enabling smoke-tailored feature representation for further exploit. Second, we introduce a texture-aware head with long convolutional kernels to integrate both global and orientation-specific information, enhancing representation for intricate smoke structure. Third, we develop a dual-task decoder for simultaneous density and location recovery, with the frequency-domain alignment in the final stage to preserve internal smoke details. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real smoke datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Specifically, comparisons with 17 models show the superiority of our method, with mean IoU improvements of 4.88%, 2.63%, and 3.17% on three test sets. (The code will be available on https://github.com/xia-xx-cv/TANet_smoke).