Abstract

Forest fires pose a persistent threat to ecosystems and human lives. The escalating
frequency of occurrence of forest fires have raised the concern over their effects on climate
change and delicate environment. Early detection and suppression of fire is essential to
save lives and environment. This needs effective and efficient methods for detection and
localization of forest fires. Image classification and other computer vision tasks have seen
state-of-the-art performance, primarily because of deep learning algorithms. Their use
in forest fire detection systems improve fire detection accuracy and, as a result, reduces
fire tragedies. Hence there is a need of a deep learning model for the detection of forest
fires.

In this dissertation a deep learning model has been proposed. The proposed model is
a novel deep learning model which uses a combination of convolutional neural network
(CNN), recurrent neural network (RNN) and fully connected layers. This model has
been used for forest fire detection from image sequences. The performance of the model
has been tested on two publicly available fire datasets–Mivia lab dataset and Kaggle fire
dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed model is able to achieve very
high accuracy and it outperforms the existing state-of-the-art results in this domain.
Contents

Certificate i

Declaration ii

Copyright Notice iii

Acknowledgements iv

Abstract v

Contents vi

List of Figures viii

List of Tables ix

Abbreviations x

1 Introduction 1
1.1 Forest fires . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Forest fire detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2.1 Image processing based approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2.2 Deep learning based approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3 Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.4 Objective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.5 Organization of the dissertation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.6 Summary of the chapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

2 Literature Survey 5
2.1 Fire detection using image processing techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2 Fire detection using deep learning based techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.3 Summary of the chapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

3 Problem Definition 8
3.1 Limitations of existing methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.2 Problem statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

vi
Contents vii

3.3 Summary of the chapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

4 Proposed Method 10
4.1 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4.1.1 Mivia lab dataset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4.1.2 Kaggle fire dataset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4.2 Proposed method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4.2.1 Preprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
4.2.2 Feature extraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
4.2.2.1 CNN unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
4.2.2.2 RNN unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4.2.3 Image classification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4.3 Summary of the Chapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

5 Experimental Results and Analysis 16

5.1 CNN parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
5.2 RNN parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
5.3 Quantitative performance on Mivia lab dataset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
5.4 Quantitative performance on Kaggle fire dataset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
5.5 Qualitative performance on the datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
5.6 Summary of the existing systems and the proposed one . . . . . . . . . . 22
5.7 Strength of the proposed method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
5.8 Summary of the Chapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

6 Conclusion and Future Scope 25

6.1 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
6.2 Future Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

References 27
List of Figures

4.1 Few sample images from mivia lab dataset. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

4.2 Few sample images from kaggle fire dataset. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4.3 Working steps of the proposed method. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4.4 Detailed architecture of the proposed model. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

5.1 Precision Recall values for Mivia lab and Kaggle fire datasets. . . . . . . . 19
5.2 ROC curve of the proposed method for the two datasets. . . . . . . . . . . 19

viii
List of Tables

4.1 Details of the two datasets used for training and testing the model. . . . . 11

5.1 Testing accuracy of proposed method I on Mivia lab dataset. . . . . . . . 18

5.2 Testing accuracy of proposed method I on Kaggle fire dataset. . . . . . . . 20
5.3 Correct classification of some sample images from Mivia lab dataset. . . . 20
5.4 Correct classification of some sample images from Kaggle fire dataset. . . 21
5.5 Incorrect classification of some sample images from Mivia lab dataset. . . 21
5.6 Incorrect classification of some sample images from Kaggle fire dataset. . 22
5.7 Performance of some significant fire detection systems and the proposed
one. Here, A denotes ”Accuracy percentage”, P denotes ”Precision” and
R denotes ”Recall”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

ix
Abbreviations

CNN Convolutional Neural Network

RNN Recurrent Neural Network
UAV Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
LSTM Long Short-Term Memory
WSN Wirelesss Sensor Network

x
Chapter 1

Introduction

This chapter describes about forest fires, their effect and detection strategies. It also
talks about some of the shortcomings in this research area and our major contributions
in the field.

1.1 Forest fires

Forest fire can be defined as any non-prescribed and uncontrolled burning or combustion
of plants in a natural condition such as a forest, brush land, tundra or grassland, which
burns on the natural fuels and spreads based on the conditions of the surrounding. For-
est fires have the ability to cause a slew of environmental disasters, wreaking havoc on
economies and ecosystems while also putting human lives at jeopardy. People, wildlife,
and the environment are all at great risk as a result of these fires. Forest fire monitoring
and detection have become increasingly important in order to preserve and sustain nat-
ural resources and protect human lives and property, and they are attracting increasing
attention across the world. The rise in the incidents of large-scale forest fires throughout
the world has made automatic fire detection one of the most important components of
early fire warning systems.

1
Chapter 1. Introduction 2

1.2 Forest fire detection

Detection of forest fire is the first step in controlling it and mitigating the affects. Fire
and smoke detector sensors can easily be installed in indoor environments, it is generally
not the case for forest areas. Sensors also require the fire to burn for a while before they
can be detected. On the contrary vision based devices can be used for almost real time
fire detection, and they can be deployed in any type of area by using different means.
These systems are also cheap and easy to install. Computer vision based approaches
for detection of forest fires have grown in popularity because of the already mentioned
challenges.

1.2.1 Image processing based approaches

There are numerous methods for fire detection using vision based approaches. Colour
model, motion, spatial and temporal features are predominantly used, as fire and smoke
have very peculiar characteristics compared to other objects. Nearly all of the methods
follow an analogous detection strategy. The usual steps involve, first finding the pixels in
motion using background subtraction then applying colour model to find fire colour re-
gions. These regions are finally investigated spatially and temporally to detect irregular
and flickering characteristics of fire. Since motion is the most prominent feature, these
methods work only with static cameras. Secondly, these methods perform well only on a
specific type of terrain and their accuracy seem to deteriorate when they are used across
diverse geographical areas. Some of these methods also rely on a fixed set of manually
extracted features and as such depend profoundly on those features. If the images that
are being analysed for fire have a general lack or less prominence of those features then
again the methods could fail. Forest fires also differ in nature from other types of fires.
This is primarily because of the fact that forest fires are generally accompanied with
massive amount of smoke, causing traditional fire detection systems to fail due to low
visibility.

1.2.2 Deep learning based approaches

Deep learning is generally considered as a highly effective technique in image classifica-

tion and localization. It can be utilized to improve detection accuracy of fire detection
Chapter 1. Introduction 3

systems, prevent fire tragedies, and reduce the social and ecological losses. Deep learning
based methods have an added advantage of not requiring manual feature extraction for
performing the final classification. The high performance and accuracy of deep learning
methods in the field of object detection could be exploited for detecting forest fires in
image sequences.

1.3 Contributions

Our work made some significant contributions in the field of forest fire detection and
localization. No study has been found in the literature in this domain employing a
combination of CNN, RNN and fully connected layers. Combining CNN and RNN results
in a superior model which can use RNN to calculate the dependency and continuity
features of the input images. This dissertation proposes a hybrid deep learning model
for forest fire detection which uses a combination of CNN, RNN and fully connected
layers.

The major contributions of our work are:

• Using a combination of CNN and RNN model for feature extraction and then using
fully connected layers for final classification.

• Detecting forest fires in images from diverse terrains with very high accuracy.

1.4 Objective

This dissertation studies the forest fire detection systems. The main objective of this
thesis is to propose a deep learning model for forest fire detection which is capable of
detecting forest fires in images with high accuracy.

1.5 Organization of the dissertation

To give the overweight of this dissertation here is a little discussion about all the
chapters. This dissertation has six chapters, including introduction. Brief discussion on
all of them is as follows:
Chapter 1. Introduction 4

• Chapter 2: Literature Survey: This chapter of the dissertation discusses about

the background of forest fire detection and the works that have already been done
in this area. It shows the review of past literature in this problem area.

• Chapter 3: Problem Statement: This chapter of the dissertation talks about

the proposed problem, which is to be focused upon in the dissertation.

• Chapter 4: Proposed Method: This chapter of the dissertation discusses about

the research methodologies and approaches that are taken to provide a solution
for the problem statement.

• Chapter 5: Experimental Results and Analysis: This chapter of the disser-

tation discusses about the results obtained from the proposed method and how it
compares with the benchmark performance in this area.

• Chapter 6: Conclusion and Future Scope: The dissertation concludes in this

chapter with some insight into the future scope of the domain and dissertation
work.
This dissertation finally concludes with references relevant to the dissertation.

1.6 Summary of the chapter

In this chapter, the dissertation introduced us with the area of research which encom-
passes the entire domain of forest fire detection. It talked about various affects of forest
fires to the environment and ecological systems. It also talked about various strategies
of detecting forest fires which are already in use or under consideration. Finally the
chapter concluded with some of our own contributions in this problem area.
Chapter 2

Literature Survey

Compared to general object detection, literature about forest fire detection using com-
puter vision based approaches are very few. Since fires are non-rigid objects with varying
structures and sizes, the majority of literature used spatial and temporal features or mo-
tion and colour features. Besides, most of the literature did not take into consideration
the dynamic locations of camera.

2.1 Fire detection using image processing techniques

Conventional image processing techniques have generally been used for detecting forest
fires. There have already been some work done in this area.

Kim et al. [1] proposed a method for detecting fires based on a colour model in video
frames on wireless sensor network. In the proposed method foreground detection was
done with background removal techniques, while background modeling was done using
a Gaussian mixture model. The authors demonstrated the colour detection method for
RGB colour space based on the expansion in area of distinct objects present in the two
adjacent frames. The videos used for creating this algorithm were acquired from static
camera to resemble a scenario where this algorithm could be used in future. Celik et
al. [2] presented a fire detection system that could work in real time. The proposed
system used registered background scene to extract the foreground region of interest
and then used colour information to make the final detection. The details of the color
information was determined by statistical measurement of the sample images. Gomes et

5
Chapter 2. Literature Survey 6

al. [3] proposed a method for detecting fires by employing vision-based approach. The
method used context-based learning and foreground extraction to improve the overall
robustness and the rate of detection of the proposed system. To make rapid distinction
between fire-coloured objects with motion and fire areas, a wavelet based model of the
frequency signature of fire and a colour-based model of the characteristic appearance of
fire were created. To reduce the amount of false alerts, the category and features of the
moving object were used in the decision-making process. Toreyin et al. [4] employed
analysis of wavelet domain in video sequences. Liu et al. [5] proposed a system for
fire detection that used the spatial, spectral and temporal characteristics of fire areas in
visual systems.

Borges et al. [8] proposed a method for detecting fires that found occurrences of fire in
video sequences using colour information. The model used visual characteristic features
of fire like area, boundary coarseness, colour, size, surface roughness and skewness to
make better detection of fire occurrences. It could be deployed for both automatically
classifying the videos as well as surveillance. Automatic video classification feature of
the model can be exploited to make real time fire detection at remote locations. It
analysed changes in specific low level features from frame to frame to locate possible fire
areas. Ho [6] proposed a smoke and flame detection approach based on machine video
that may be used in conjunction with a surveillance system to provide early warnings.
The method combined the spatial, spectral and temporal smoke and flame features to
carry out the detection.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are aircrafts having the capability of utilising aero-
dynamic lift for flying and they could be guided without the presence of an on-board
crew. One of the significant use of UAVs is in the field of surveillance and inspection
[9]. Cruz et al. [10] proposed a technique for detecting forest fires. It could be used
in unmanned aerial vehicles. The system used a new colour index for detecting forest
fires. The model consisted of a conversion unit, so that the images from RGB three
band space could be converted to a grey scale band. This conversion unit of the model
used some image processing techniques so that the desired colours could be improved.
Then a procedure of thresholding was used to binarize the result, which finally separated
the regions of interest from the rest of the image. The presented method endeavoured
to make a connection between the minimum time of execution and effective process for
detecting fires.
Chapter 2. Literature Survey 7

Mahmoud et al. [11] proposed a method for detecting forest fires which used a rule based
computer vision approach together with variations in temporal domain. The proposed
method used foreground extraction to find the motion in the foreground regions of
interest. It transformed the segmented areas in motion from RGB to YCbCr colour
space and also used a number of fire detection rules for differentiating the potential fire
areas. The system used temporal variations to make a distinction between fire and fire-
coloured pixels. Khatami et al. [12] proposed an alarm system for fires employing image
processing approaches. The employed approaches were based on K-medoids clustering
and particle swarm optimization [13][14]. The proposed method employed a conversion
matrix to detail a new fire-flame based colour-space, which was based on colour features.
The authors developed a colour space on the basis of fire flame pixels, colour features of
the input images and linear multiplication of a conversion matrix. A separating colour
space was created by the matrix multiplication to point out the relevant regions and
dim out the non-relevant regions of the images. Particle swarm optimization was then
used to calculate the weights of the colour separating conversion matrix.

2.2 Fire detection using deep learning based techniques

Zhao et al. [7] proposed a deep learning based forest fire detection system. The method
could be used for detecting forest fires in images captured by UAVs. The proposed
method significantly reduced the loss of features, which is generally caused when the
dimensions of the images are changed. The method used a 15 layer deep CNN architec-
tural design and produced a forest fire feature extractor and classification model capable
of learning on its own. For segmenting and locating the fire regions, classification using
logistic regressors and saliency detection methods were used.

2.3 Summary of the chapter

This chapter explained about the previous dedicated works in the field of fire detection
in images and video sequences. This chapter also looked at the strengths and weaknesses
of some of the works.
Chapter 3

Problem Definition

In this chapter the dissertation talks about various problems associated with the current
and previous approaches of forest fire detection. This chapter also talks about some of
the limitations of existing works in the field of fire detection. This chapter also contain
the problem statement of our approach.

3.1 Limitations of existing methods

Several investigation reports are available on the development of fire detection and these
studies have tried to improve the overall detection accuracy. Most of these studies have
used colour and motion features [1][2][3]. As forest fires in different regions seem to have
different colour and motion characteristics, these methods might fail as they have high
dependency on a few peculiar characteristics. Spatial and temporal features have also
been reported in some of the works [4][5][6]. These methods could also fail if there is a
lot of smoke accompanying the fire regions. Deep CNN based methods have been used
in a few investigation reports [7], but with limited success.

After review of forest fire detection techniques and related work, we have identified few
limitations of current approaches. These limitations are given below.

1. Current approaches are highly depended on manually extracted features of fires in

images, and as such those approaches could not generalize well to forest fires of different
geographical areas.

8
Chapter 3. Problem Definition 9

2. There is limited work in the field of fire detection using deep learning methods.

3.2 Problem statement

From the current limitations of forest fire detection we have defined our problem state-
ment as following:

”Proposing a deep learning method to detect forest fires in images with high accuracy”.

3.3 Summary of the chapter

This chapter discussed about the issues related with previous and current forest fire
detection systems. Problem statement of our work has been discussed in this chapter.
This dissertation work focuses on the stated problem statement.
Chapter 4

Proposed Method

As explained in previous, chapter there is a need of better forest fire detection methods
to overcome some of the stated problems. In this chapter we explain in detail the pro-
posed solution.

4.1 Datasets

The present work has used Mivia lab dataset [15] and Kaggle fire dataset [16] for the
first proposed method. Both of these datasets are publicly available. The details of the
datasets used in the present work are elaborated below.

4.1.1 Mivia lab dataset

Mivia lab dataset contains 150 video sequences of 10 minutes each. About half of these
videos contain fire or smoke sequences of forest areas and the other half does not contain
any fire or smoke sequence. Images have been extracted from these videos at an interval
of 4 seconds. The image extraction process resulted in the accumulation of 22500 images.
Out of these images 12000 images contain fire or smoke sequences and the remaining
10500 images does not contain any trace of fire or smoke. Few sample images from Mivia
lab dataset are shown in Fig. 4.1.

10
Chapter 4. Proposed Method 11

(a) (b)

(c) (d)

Figure 4.1: Few sample images from mivia lab dataset.

Table 4.1: Details of the two datasets used for training and testing the model.

Total number Non-fire Training set Testing set

Dataset Fire images
of images images size size
Mivia lab 22500 12000 10500 15750 6750
Kaggle fire 1000 755 245 700 300

4.1.2 Kaggle fire dataset

Kaggle fire dataset contains 1000 images in total. 755 of these are fire images and the
rest 245 are non-fire images. Few sample images from Kaggle fire dataset are shown in
Fig. 4.2.

Both of the datasets have been divided into training and test sets. From Mivia lab
dataset 8400 fire images and 7350 non-fire images have been used for training. From
Kaggle fire dataset 528 fire images and 172 non-fire images have been used for training.
The rest of the images from both the datasets have been used for testing. The detailed
statistics of the two datasets is shown in Table 4.1.
Chapter 4. Proposed Method 12

(a) (b)

(c) (d)

Figure 4.2: Few sample images from kaggle fire dataset.

Figure 4.3: Working steps of the proposed method.

4.2 Proposed method

The proposed method is a combination of CNN, RNN and fully connected layers. It
consists of various steps. In the very first step, images have been extracted from video
sequences of the dataset. Then these images have been converted to a fixed dimension,
so that they could be fed to the model. This concludes the preprocessing step. Then
the processed images have been fed to the CNN-RNN feature extractor. The output of
the feature extractor has been given to the fully connected layers which made the final
classification. Various steps involved in the proposed method are illustrated in Fig. 4.3.

The proposed approach is discussed in detail further below.:

Chapter 4. Proposed Method 13

4.2.1 Preprocessing

The first step involves processing the dataset to make it suitable for our model. Since
the model has been trained on two different datasets, processing of these datasets has
also been slightly different.

For the Mivia lab dataset, first the images have been extracted from the video sequences.
For the Kaggle fire dataset, there is no need of image extraction as the dataset itself
contains image sequences. The images from both the datasets have been resized to have
a dimension of 128x128x3. The resizing of images to a fixed dimension is important
because the fully connected layers require a fixed size feature map. Resizing the images
to a smaller dimension makes training faster. After resizing the datasets have been
augmented by flipping and zooming the images.

4.2.2 Feature extraction

Feature extraction step follows the preprocessing step. In this step numerous charac-
teristic of the images have been extracted by the CNN-RNN combination. At first the
processed input images have been fed to the CNN unit. The output of CNN unit has
been given as an input to the RNN unit, which further extracted sequence and continuity
features. The details of the aforesaid two units are discussed below.

4.2.2.1 CNN unit

This unit has the responsibility of extracting the characteristic features of images. The
processed input images have been directly fed to this unit, and as such it has the re-
sponsibility of extracting low level as well as high level features of the input image. This
unit consists of convolution and pooling layers. Convolution layers extract features us-
ing filters and the pooling layers reduces the dimension of those feature maps to make
it computationally efficient for further layers. Having a CNN unit reduces the compu-
tational cost of extracting features. Also the CNN unit can learn very sophisticated
features from the input image, making classification simple for further layers.
Chapter 4. Proposed Method 14

Figure 4.4: Detailed architecture of the proposed model.

4.2.2.2 RNN unit

This unit of the model is responsible for extracting continuity and sequence features. The
output of the CNN unit has been flattened and then given to the RNN unit. Specifically,
the RNN unit is comprised of lstm units stacked together. This unit receives input
from the CNN unit and as such it is already fed complex features which the CNN unit
outputs. It extracts important sequence information and then feeds this output to the
fully connected unit.

4.2.3 Image classification

The fully connected layers of the model are responsible for making final classification.
The output of the RNN unit has been fed to a dense layer of 1024 units, which itself is
connected to another dense layer of 256 units. This dense layer is connected to a single
unit which makes the final classification of the images. The detailed architecture of the
model is illustrated in Fig. 4.4.
Chapter 4. Proposed Method 15

4.3 Summary of the Chapter

This chapter introduced us with the solution which has been proposed for forest fire
detection. The proposed method is a hybrid model of CNN and RNN and is used for
detection of forest fire images. The chapter also discussed the detailed architecture of
the proposed model.
Chapter 5

Experimental Results and

Analysis

This chapter analyses the results obtained from the proposed method and compares it
with the existing state-of-the-art results in this field.

For the purpose of experimenting, Mivial lab dataset and kaggle fire dataset have been
split into training and testing sets. Two classes have been considered for classification:
positive (fire) and negative (no fire). In both the training and test set all the images
have been labelled as either positive class or negative class. The proposed model has
been optimised using Adam optimization algorithm [17]. Binary cross entropy function
has been as a loss function. The value of learning rate used for training the model is
0.001.

5.1 CNN parameters

For the proposed model, CNN architecture consists of a total of six convolutions (conv1,
conv2, conv3, conv4, conv5, conv6). The initial three convolutions (conv1, conv2, conv3)
have been applied consecutively to the processed input image. Maxpooling (pool1) has
been applied after these three convolutions. After this, two more consecutive convolu-
tions (conv4, conv5) have been applied. Maxpooling (pool2) has been applied again.
Finally one final convolution (conv6) has been applied, followed by the final maxpooling
16
Chapter 5. Experimental Results and Analysis 17

(pool3). Filter size of 3x3 has been used for every convolution operation. Padding has
also been applied during each convolution operation to maintain the height and width
of the feature map. For the first three convolutions (conv1, conv2, conv3) 64 filters have
been used. For the next two convolutions (conv4, conv5) 128 filters have been used,
and for the final convolution (conv6) 256 filters have been used. Pooling operations
have been applied on 2x2 subareas of the feature maps, with stride of 2. The processed
images that have been fed to the CNN unit have a size of 128x128x3. The final feature
map obtained after the last maxpooling (pool3) operation has a dimension of 16x16x256.

5.2 RNN parameters

In the proposed method, the RNN unit is comprised of long short term memory (LSTM)
units stacked together. The output feature map of the CNN unit has been flattened and
then fed to the RNN unit. The model has 50 recurrently connected memory blocks in
its hidden layer. The proposed model has also been tested with other memory block
combinations, but the one that uses 50 memory blocks yielded the best results. Sigmoid
function has been used as the gate activation function.

5.3 Quantitative performance on Mivia lab dataset

Various combinations of batch size, block size and epoch have been used for training
and testing the model on Mivia lab dataset. Out of all these combinations, the best
results have been achieved at 150 epoch with batch size of 64 and block size of 50. The
precision and recall value is 0.9954 and 0.9975 respectively. The detailed result is shown
in Table 5.1. The precision recall graph for the best combination of epoch, batch size
and block size (150, 64, 50) in shown in Fig. 5.1. ROC curve of the proposed method
for the Mivia lab dataset is shown in Fig. 5.2

5.4 Quantitative performance on Kaggle fire dataset

For Kaggle fire dataset various combinations of batch size, block size and epoch have
been used for training and testing the model. Out of all these combinations, the best
Chapter 5. Experimental Results and Analysis 18

Table 5.1: Testing accuracy of proposed method I on Mivia lab dataset.

Dataset Epoch Batch Size Block Size Accuracy (%)

50 97.22
32 75 97.41
100 100 97.85
50 96.92
64 75 96.96
100 96.60
Mivia lab 50 99.16
32 75 98.82
150 100 98.75
50 99.62
64 75 99.53
100 99.53
50 98.92
32 75 99.13
200 100 98.85
50 99.42
64 75 99.09
100 98.78

results have been achieved at 200 epoch with batch size of 32 and block size of 50. The
precision and recall value is 0.9882 and 1.0000 respectively. The detailed result is shown
in Table 5.2. The precision recall graph for the best combination of epoch, batch size
and block size (200, 32, 50) in shown in Fig. 5.1. ROC curve of the proposed method
for the Kaggle fire dataset is shown in Fig. 5.2

5.5 Qualitative performance on the datasets

Tables 5.3 and 5.4 show correct classification of some of the sample images from test
sets of the two datasets. Tables 5.5 and 5.6 show incorrect classification of some of the
sample images from test sets of the two datasets.
Chapter 5. Experimental Results and Analysis 19

Figure 5.1: Precision Recall values for Mivia lab and Kaggle fire datasets.

Figure 5.2: ROC curve of the proposed method for the two datasets.
Chapter 5. Experimental Results and Analysis 20

Table 5.2: Testing accuracy of proposed method I on Kaggle fire dataset.

Dataset Epoch Batch Size Block Size Accuracy (%)

50 97.60
32 75 97.30
100 100 97.20
50 96.90
64 75 97.10
100 96.80
Kaggle fire 50 98.30
32 75 98.40
150 100 98.15
50 98.45
64 75 98.35
100 98.20
50 99.10
32 75 98.80
200 100 98.90
50 98.80
64 75 98.70
100 98.60

Table 5.3: Correct classification of some sample images from Mivia lab dataset.

Image sample Original class Obtained class

Fire Fire

Fire Fire

Non-fire Non-fire

Non-fire Non-fire
Chapter 5. Experimental Results and Analysis 21

Table 5.4: Correct classification of some sample images from Kaggle fire dataset.

Image sample Original class Obtained class

Fire Fire

Fire Fire

Non-fire Non-fire

Non-fire Non-fire

Table 5.5: Incorrect classification of some sample images from Mivia lab dataset.

Image sample Original class Obtained class

Fire Non-fire

Fire Non-fire

Non-fire Fire

Non-fire Fire
Chapter 5. Experimental Results and Analysis 22

Table 5.6: Incorrect classification of some sample images from Kaggle fire dataset.

Image sample Original class Obtained class

Fire Non-fire

Fire Non-fire

Non-fire Fire

Non-fire Fire

5.6 Summary of the existing systems and the proposed

one

Table 5.7 lists the summary of some of the prominent fire detection systems that have
already been worked on and the one that has been proposed. The experimental results
are presented only for Mivia lab dataset and Kaggle fire dataset. The existing studies
have been evaluated from the same datasets.

5.7 Strength of the proposed method

The major strengths of the proposed model are listed below:

• Combining CNN and RNN creates a superior model and as such the proposed
model is capable of detecting forest fires in images from different geographical
terrains.

• The proposed model has been tested on two large publicly available datasets.

• The high accuracy of the model makes it suitable for deployment in real forest fire
detection applications.
Chapter 5. Experimental Results and Analysis 23

Table 5.7: Performance of some significant fire detection systems and the proposed
one. Here, A denotes ”Accuracy percentage”, P denotes ”Precision” and R denotes
”Recall”.

Study Method Dataset Performance

Background Mivia lab A: 96.69, P: 1.0000, R: 0.9285
Kim et al. [1]
subtraction Kaggle fire A: 96.50, P: 1.0000, R: 0.9265
Background Mivia lab A: 98.89, P: 0.9900, R: 0.9800
Celik et al. [2]
subtraction Kaggle fire A; 98.56, P: 0.9880, R: 0.9775
Background Mivia lab A: 93.10, P: 1.0000, R: 0.9010
Gomes et al. [3]
subtraction Kaggle fire A: 93.20, P: 1.0000, R: 0.9040
Spatial and Mivia lab A: 99.20, P: 0.9480, R: 1.0000
Toreyin et al. [4]
temporal analysis Kaggle fire A: 98.80, P: 0.9415, R: 1.0000
Spectral, spatial and Mivia lab A: 93.42, P: 0.8368, R: 0.9960
Liu et al. [5]
temporal analysis Kaggle fire A: 93.80, P: 0.8470, R: 0.9950
Probabilistic colour Mivia lab A: 99.32, P: 0.9940, R: 0.9910
Borges et al. [8]
model Kaggle fire A: 98.90, P: 0.9925, R: 0.9890
Spectral, spatial and Mivia lab A: 82.38, P: 0.9923, R: 0.8291
Ho [6]
temporal analysis Kaggle fire A: 82.15, P: 0.9910, R: 0.8250
Mivia lab A: 97.67, P: 0.9739, R: 0.9630
Cruz et al. [10] New colour index
Kaggle fire A: 97.10, P: 0.9890, R: 0.9620
Mivia lab A: 98.00, P: 0.9730, R: 0.9880
Zhao et al. [7] Deep learning
Kaggle fire A: 97.72, P: 0.9710, R: 0.9825
Background Mivia lab A: 92.80, P: 0.9259, R: 0.9313
Mahmoud et al. [11]
subtraction Kaggle fire A: 93.15, P: 0.9290, R: 0.9350
Mivia lab A: 93.40, P: 0.9220, R: 0.8624
Khatami et al. [12] New colour space
Kaggle fire A: 93.15, P: 0.9210, R: 0.8645
Mivia lab A: 99.62, P: 0.9954, R: 0.9975
Proposed Method Deep Learning
Kaggle fire A: 99.10, P: 0.9882, R: 1.0000
Chapter 5. Experimental Results and Analysis 24

5.8 Summary of the Chapter

This chapter analysed the experimental results obtained for the proposed method. The
performance of the model is also compared with some significant works that have already
been done in that field. It can be observed that the proposed model outperformed the
state-of-the-art systems in it’s domain.
Chapter 6

Conclusion and Future Scope

In the previous chapters of this dissertation, existing and proposed forest fire detection
and localization systems have been discussed. Finally, in this chapter, we conclude the
dissertation and discuss about the future of forest fire detection and localization.

6.1 Conclusion

The proposed method introduces a deep learning based approach for forest detection.
This method uses a hybrid CNN and RNN based deep learning model for forest fire
detection. The model has been evaluated on two different datasets and it outperformed
the existing methods in this regard. This method also overcomes many different draw-
backs of the existing systems. It is evident that the proposed system could be employed
to detect forest fires in real world scenarios. The proposed method is likely to bring new
insights to academics working on developing fire detection methods in different areas.

6.2 Future Scope

In the future, further sophisticated deep learning approaches will be used to carry out
the inquiry in this subject area. It is also planned to improve the detection accuracy of
the proposed system in non-forest areas, especially fires that occur in residential areas
and industrial areas. Detecting fires in residential areas will make the proposed model
a generalized model capable of detecting fires in all sorts of environment. It is also

25
Chapter 6. Conclusion and Future Scope 26

planned to look into the potential of employing our model for low resolution satellite
images covering large geographical areas.
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