Wildfire Detection via a Dual-Channel CNN with Multi-Level Feature Fusion

Abstract

Forest fires have devastating impacts on ecology, the economy, and human life. Therefore, the timely detection and extinguishing of fires are crucial to minimizing the losses caused by these disasters. A novel dual-channel CNN for forest fires is proposed in this paper based on multiple feature enhancement techniques. First, the features’ semantic information and richness are enhanced by repeatedly fusing deep and shallow features extracted from the basic network model and integrating the results of multiple types of pooling layers. Second, an attention mechanism, the convolutional block attention module, is used to focus on the key details of the fused features, making the network more efficient. Finally, two improved single-channel networks are merged to obtain a better-performing dual-channel network. In addition, transfer learning is used to address overfitting and reduce time costs. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed model for fire recognition is 98.90%, with a better performance. The findings from this study can be applied to the early detection of forest fires, assisting forest ecosystem managers in developing timely and scientifically informed defense strategies to minimize the damage caused by fires.