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International Journal of Wildland Fire International Journal of Wildland Fire Society
Journal of the International Association of Wildland Fire
RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

FireFormer: an efficient Transformer to identify forest fire from surveillance cameras

Yuming Qiao A B # , Wenyu Jiang A B # , Fei Wang https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7059-4287 A B * , Guofeng Su A , Xin Li C and Juncai Jiang A B
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A Department of Engineering Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.

B Institute of Safety Science and Technology, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Shenzhen, 518000, China.

C Foshan Urban Safety Research Center, Foshan, 528000, China.

* Correspondence to: feiwang@tsinghua.edu.cn
# These authors contributed equally to this paper

International Journal of Wildland Fire 32(9) 1364-1380 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF22220
Submitted: 26 November 2022  Accepted: 18 July 2023   Published: 14 August 2023

© 2023 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of IAWF. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)

Abstract

Background: An effective identification model is crucial to realise the real-time monitoring and early warning of forest fires from surveillance cameras. However, existing models are prone to generate numerous false alarms under the interference of artificial smoke such as industrial smoke and villager cooking smoke, therefore a superior identification model is urgently needed.

Aims: In this study, we tested the Transformer-based model FireFormer to predict the risk probability of forest fire from the surveillance images.

Methods: FireFormer uses a shifted window self-attention module to extract similarities of divided patches in the image. The similarity in characteristics indicated the probability of forest fires. The GradCAM algorithm was then applied to analyse the interest area of FireFormer model and visualise the contribution of different image patches by calculating gradient reversely. To verify our model, the monitoring data from the high-point camera in Nandan Mountain, Foshan City, was collected and further constructed as a forest fire alarm dataset.

Key results: Our results showed that FireFormer achieved a competitive performance (OA: 82.21%, Recall: 86.635% and F1-score: 74.68%).

Conclusions: FireFormer proves to be superior to traditional methods.

Implications: FireFormer provides an efficient way to reduce false alarms and avoid heavy manual re-checking work.

Keywords: deep learning, forest fire identification, GradCAM, Interpretability analysis, self-attention mechanism, smoke detection, Transformer, wildland–urban interface.


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