Efficient Fire Detection with E-EFNet: A Lightweight Deep Learning-Based Approach for Edge Devices

Abstract

Fire detection employing vision sensors has drawn significant attention within the computer vision community, primarily due to its practicality and utility. Previous research predominantly relied on basic color features, a methodology that has since been surpassed by adopting deep learning models for enhanced accuracy. Nevertheless, the persistence of false alarms and increased computational demands remains challenging. Furthermore, contemporary feed-forward neural networks face difficulties stemming from their initialization and weight allocation processes, often resulting in vanishing-gradient issues that hinder convergence. This investigation recognizes the considerable challenges and introduces the cost-effective Encoded EfficientNet (E-EFNet) model. This model demonstrates exceptional proficiency in fire recognition while concurrently mitigating the incidence of false alarms. E-EFNet leverages the lightweight EfficientNetB0 as a foundational feature extractor, augmented by a series of stacked autoencoders for refined feature extraction before the final classification phase. In contrast to conventional linear connections, E-EFNet adopts dense connections, significantly enhancing its effectiveness in identifying fire-related scenes. We employ a randomized weight initialization strategy to mitigate the vexing problem of vanishing gradients and expedite convergence. Comprehensive evaluation against contemporary state-of-the-art benchmarks reaffirms E-EFNet’s superior recognition capabilities. The proposed model outperformed state-of-the-art approaches in accuracy over the Foggia and Yar datasets by achieving a higher accuracy of 0.31 and 0.40, respectively, and its adaptability for efficient inferencing on edge devices. Our study thoroughly assesses various deep models before ultimately selecting E-EFNet as the optimal solution for these pressing challenges in fire detection.