Development and evaluation of a vision-based transfer learning approach for indoor fire and smoke detection

Fire poses a significant risk across industrial and domestic settings, especially to firefighters who must tackle the blaze. Current technology for detection in indoor environments are smoke detectors and flame detectors. However, these detectors have several limitations during the ignition phase of a fire and propagation. These systems cannot detect an exact position of the fire nor how the fire is spreading or its size, all of which is necessary information for fire services when dealing with these incidents. A potential solution is to use artificial intelligence techniques such as computer vision, which has shown the potential to detect and recognise objects and activities in indoor spaces. This study aims to develop a vision-based fire and smoke detection system. A deep learning technique that incorporates convolutional neural networks (CNN) was utilised to develop the real-time detection approach that can potentially provide necessary information for fire services, including identifying the position and size of the fire and how the fire spreads. A transfer learning approach using a pre-trained model was used to train the detector. Based on the detection and recognition tests using indoor fire and smoke videos, results indicated that the fire detection achieved up to 92.37% correct detections while the smoke detection did not perform as well. Hence, further improvement and evaluation of the detection approach will be conducted in future work, focusing on the impact of different parameters such as the detection model, building type, indoor space size and positioning of the detection camera. The present study provides an insight into the capabilities and potential applications of the concept.