Visual Intelligence in Smart Cities: A Lightweight Deep Learning Model for Fire Detection in an IoT Environment

The recognition of fire at its early stages and stopping it from causing socioeconomic and environmental disasters remains a demanding task. Despite the availability of convincing networks, there is a need to develop a lightweight network for resource-constraint devices rather than real-time fire detection in smart city contexts. To overcome this shortcoming, we presented a novel efficient lightweight network called FlameNet for fire detection in a smart city environment. Our proposed network works via two main steps: first, it detects the fire using the FlameNet; then, an alert is initiated and directed to the fire, medical, and rescue departments. Furthermore, we incorporate the MSA module to efficiently prioritize and enhance relevant fire-related prominent features for effective fire detection. The newly developed Ignited-Flames dataset is utilized to undertake a thorough analysis of several convolutional neural network (CNN) models. Additionally, the proposed FlameNet achieves 99.40% accuracy for fire detection. The empirical findings and analysis of multiple factors such as model accuracy, size, and processing time prove that the suggested model is suitable for fire detection.