2024/08/19 by Julius Pesonen, Pesonen, Julius, Teemu Hakala +15 · 3 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · Environmental Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Fire Detection and Safety Systems #Fire effects on ecosystems #I.4.6 #Video Surveillance and Tracking Methods
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2408.10843
openalex publication_date 2024/08/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Early detection of wildfires is essential to prevent large-scale fires resulting in extensive environmental, structural, and societal damage. Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) can cover large remote areas effectively with quick deployment requiring minimal infrastructure and equipping them with small cameras and computers enables autonomous real-time detection. In remote areas, however, detection methods are limited to onboard computation due to the lack of high-bandwidth mobile networks. For accurate camera-based localisation, segmentation of the detected smoke is essential but training data for deep learning-based wildfire smoke segmentation is limited. This study shows how small specialised segmentation models can be trained using only bounding box labels, leveraging zero-shot foundation model supervision. The method offers the advantages of needing only fairly easily obtainable bounding box labels and requiring training solely for the smaller student network. The proposed method achieved 63.3% mIoU on a manually annotated and diverse wildfire dataset. The used model can perform in real-time at ~25 fps with a UAV-carried NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX computer while reliably recognising smoke, as demonstrated at real-world forest burning events. Code is available at: https://gitlab.com/fginls/public/wildfire-real-time-segmentation