2020 IEEE REGION 10 CONFERENCE (TENCON)
Osaka, Japan, November 16-19, 2020
Early Detection of Forest Fire using Deep
Learning
Medi Rahul, Karnekanti Shiva Saketh, Attili Sanjeet and Nenavath Srinivas Naik
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
International Institute of Information Technology(IIIT) Naya Raipur, India
Email: medi18100@iiitnr.edu.in, shiva18100@iiitnr.edu.in, attili18100@iiitnr.edu.in, srinu@iiitnr.edu.in
Abstract—Forest fires have become a serious threat to
mankind. Besides providing shelter and protection to a large
number of living beings, they have been a major source of
food, wood, and a great supply of other products. Since ancient
times forests have played an important role in social, economic,
and religious activities and have enriched human life in a
variety of ways both material and psychological. To protect
our nature from these rapidly rising forest fires, we need to be
cautious enough of every decision we take which could lead to
a disastrous end, once and for all. So for the early detection of
forest fires, we propose an image recognition method based on
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). We have fine-tuned the
Resnet50 architecture and added a few convolutional layers with
ReLu as the activation functions, and a binary classification
output layer which showed a huge impact on the training and
test results when compared to the other SOTA methods like
VGG16 AND DenseNet121. We achieved a training set accuracy
of 92.27% and 89.57% test accuracy with a stochastic gradient
descent optimizer and we have avoided the underfit/overfitting
on the model with the help of the Stochastic Gradient Descent
(SGD) algorithm.
Index Terms—Forest Fire Detection, CNN
I. I NTRODUCTION
The most common forest hazard is a forest fire. They
pose a threat not only to the richness of the forest but also
to the flora and fauna, which seriously affect biodiversity
and ecology. According to the Brazilian National Institute
of Space Research (INPE), in Brazil, Amazonas, at the last
official count, about 76,000 trees were burned, more than
80% compared to the same period last year. At least 33
people were killed, including 4 firefighters and more. On
January 31, 2020, more than 11 million hectares (110,000
square kilometers) of bushes and forest parks across Australia
were burned.
The importance of forests should not be ignored. There is
a great dependence on our survival with forests, on the air
we breathe, on the wood we use. Forests not only provide
habitats for animals and humans, they also protect river
basins, prevent soil erosion, and reduce climate change.
With today’s world advancing in the technology era, there
has been a keen interest in the image processing technology,
the fire detection method based on the computer vision
system [9] reached its pinnacle and replaced many traditional
methods and is playing a vital role in our day to day life.
Human and natural disasters are the main cause of forest
fires. CNN smoothens the image recognition in the fea-
ture extraction process by theoretically extracting deeper
functions which greatly improves the accuracy of fire im-
age recognition. In this study, we compared the perfor-
mance of different state of the art models like VGG16 and
DenseNet121 with the proposed fine-tuned ResNet50 model
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The rest of the paper is organized in the following manner.
A detailed review of traditional methods used for the detec-
tion of forest fires is presented in Section II. An overview
of the Proposed model is detailed in Section III. Section IV
gives an overview of the results. Finally, Section V concludes
the paper.
II. L ITERATURE S URVEY
Studies about fire detection are very few compared to
general classification and detection algorithms. A method for
detecting forest fires has been proposed based on wireless
sensor networks [8]. This is a traditional approach to the
problem. The results are accurate but implementing it on a
large scale is bound to be difficult.
A small scale CNN is implemented using YOLOv3 and
the test results show that the detection rate of this algorithm
is approximately 83% [1]. The algorithm is sensitive to a
large forest areas and the detection of fire in less probabilistic
fire-prone areas is bad.
A Faster R-CNN has been proposed to detect forest fires
[3]. To solve the ambiguity in training data non-real smoke
images were produced by putting up real or simulative smoke
into the forest background. However, this detection algorithm
is more prone to simulative forest smoke, and hence it
requires further improvements in boosting the performance
with real-time fire detection.
Wildfire’s smoke detection method has been developed to
provide a fast, inexpensive, and reliable system for moni-
toring fire-sensitive areas [4]. The proposed approach uses
algorithms to extract features based on image processing
techniques and classifications based on computer-aided intel-
ligence strategies. In terms of space and time, the preparatory
step consists of subsampling the image sequences, then de-
tecting the movement zone, which extracts the smoking zones
in question. The candidate regions are then processed using
a smoke color analysis algorithm, a sharp edge detector,
and detection techniques for growing and increasing areas.
Neural classifiers are then used to estimate the areas that
describe the smoking areas in different settings. It was an
effective approach that worked well even under less than
ideal conditions. Poor visibility conditions can lead to false
positives but do not increase false alarms.
A real-time smoke detection has been proposed for the
techniques of accumulation of foreground images and optical
flow [7]. This technique was used to extract the movement
properties of smoke and flames and to distinguish them
by their color disturbances. Their method is more likely
to suppress noise and attenuate it completely in successive
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 Fig. 1. Overview of proposed model.
frames. Restrictions were limited to light-sensitive objects.
For example, lights turned on and off, etc. But their technique
knew how to distinguish the other fire-like objects.
A combination of motion detection and color detection
had improved detection speed and eliminated excess events
[16]. Second, the motion detection was based on the im-
age frame difference method. Finally, pretreatment can be
combined with advanced flame extraction to reduce time
complexity. Subsequently, important visual properties of the
flame were used, such as color, movement, change of area
and shape, and a new algorithm were offered to stabilize
the center of gravity based on space and time. Finally, the
support vector machine gives satisfactory results, according
to the experimental results, the accuracy was almost 95%,
but the algorithm has certain limits, for example, when
personnel dressed in crimson clothing is blocked by devices
or when workers have a pick-up within a certain range by
the introduced advanced features can lead to false alarms
in these conditions. Therefore, optimistic methods must be
implemented to solve the problems of the real environment.
III. P ROPOSED M ODEL
Forests play a significant role in preserving the ecosystem.
As a result, there has been considerable work done on forest
fire detection. Most of the literature does not focus on trying
to achieve high detection rates across multiple databases.
In this paper, we use transfer learning to develop a
model that addresses this challenge. The system involves pre-
processing the image data and applying data augmentation
such as shearing, flipping, etc. to generate more images. We
then use models like VGG16, ResNet50, and DenseNet121
for the classification of images.
Figure 1 states the explanation of the model proposed.
The model initially divides the train and test sets in 80%
and 20% respectively. Next, the data is prepared to enter
the pre-processing phase and gets augmented to reduce the
overfitting in the model (Augmentation is a regularization
method, which used to prevent overfitting). Finally, it is
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trained to classify into two classes fire and non-fire. The
above model is then run on the test set to provide the results.
The proposed model uses ResNet50 with transfer learning
to train the model. The images are resized to 224x224 pixels.
The dataset is split into train and test data with 80% and 20%
respectively. Fine-tuning plays a major role in the reliability
of the proposed model. First, the layers in the proposed
model are frozen. Besides, we proposed some of the layers
with ReLu function and softmax for classification.
The proposed layers include one convolutional layer, one
pooling layer, a Batch Normalization, a ReLu activation layer
with a Dropout (to avoid overfitting), and finally, a softmax
layer for the image classification. The optimizer chosen was
SGD as the test cases prove that SGD gives a good global
minimum. By using the optimal learning rate, the proposed
model was able to achieve a training set accuracy of 92.27%
and a test set accuracy of 89.57%.
In figures 2 and 3, the detection of images is classified
into two classes (fire and non-fire). First, the input image
is convolved with different feature detectors to get a feature
map and then pooled to get a max feature pooled map. After
that, it is flattened and passed on to the input features. All
this working is taken care of by ResNet50 architecture. The
image is resized to 224x224 and passed onto the ResNet50
model and once the probabilities have crossed the threshold
then it gets classified with the help of softmax into the classes
0 (fire) and 1 (non-fire).
Parameters Value
Batch Size 16
Dropout 0.5
Activation Function Softmax
Optimizer SGD with learning rate 0.001
Loss Function Binary cross entropy
Epochs 100
TABLE I
PARAMETERS
Two types of parameters are used to compile the model:
 Fig. 2. Detecting Images with Class: Fire

Fig. 3. Detecting Images with Class: No Fire

learning rate and momentum. Learning rates were dependent

on the type of optimizers used (Adam/SGD) while momen-
tum is initially 0.9. Fine-tuning was done to make sure the
model does not generalize the pattern found in images. The
batch size is initialized as 16 and the model is trained over
100 epochs.
The parameters listed in Table I are finalized after per-
forming multiple test cases. To decrease the training time,
the batch size is finalized as 16. To classify images based
on probabilities, the activation function used was softmax.
The optimal learning rate (0.001) is used so that while we
iterate over the number of epochs, the weights get updated
in backpropagation and reach its global minimum.

Fig. 5. VGG16 Loss

them, ResNet50 performed better compared to VGG16 and

DenseNet121.
Results generated using VGG16 are shown in Table II.
The first test condition was running Adam optimizer without
momentum and the results were close to 75%. Next, when
the test condition was added with a momentum of 0.9, the
accuracy was close to 83% only. Even when the optimizer
was changed to Stochastic Gradient Descent and with a
momentum of 0.9 the accuracy was still 85%. This made
us move onto ResNet50 and DenseNet121.
Results generated using ResNet50 are shown in Table
Fig. 4. VGG16 Accuracy III. The first test condition was running Adam optimizer
without momentum and the results were close to 87%. Next,
when the test condition was added with a momentum of 0.9,
IV. RESULTS the accuracy was close to 89% only. When the optimizer
Results have been generated using CNN based mod- was changed to Stochastic Gradient Descent and with a
els like VGG16, ResNet50, and DenseNet121. Among momentum of 0.9 the accuracy achieved was 92.27%.

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 Results generated using DenseNet121 are shown in Table
IV. The first test condition was running Adam optimizer
without momentum and the results were close to 83%. Next,
when the test condition was added with a momentum of
0.9, the accuracy was still close to 85% only. When the
optimizer was changed to Stochastic Gradient Descent and
with a momentum of 0.9 the accuracy achieved was 89%
with traces of overfitting.

TABLE II
VGG16 T EST C ASE R ESULTS

Test Condition Result (Accuracy)

Adam optimizer without momentum 74.52%
Adam optimizer with momentum=0.9 82.73%
SGD optimizer with momentum=0.9 85.21%

Fig. 7. ResNet50 Loss

TABLE III
R ES N ET 50 T EST C ASE R ESULTS
Test Condition
Adam optimizer without momentum
Adam optimizer with momentum=0.9
SGD optimizer with momentum=0.9
TABLE IV
D ENSE N ET 121 T EST C ASE R ESULTS
Test Condition
Adam optimizer without momentum
Adam optimizer with momentum=0.9
SGD optimizer with momentum=0.9
decent explanation for vanishing gradient descent problem
when compared to VGG16.
Result (Accuracy) Figure 6 shares information on ResNet50 architecture’s
87.37%
89.92% accuracy versus Epochs (100 epochs). The relevant re-
92.27% sults generated are shown in Table III. ResNet50 consumes
less memory when compared to VGG16. The accuracy of
ResNet50 is the highest among all the models built.
In figure 7, the information shows us that the training
set error and test set error are well under control with low
bias and low variance(ideal condition). It gradually decreases
Result (Accuracy) with an increase in the number of epochs. This proves that
83.24%
84.59%
ResNet50 is a reliable model.
89.04% In figures 8 and 9, the plot describes the Model accuracy
against the number of epochs. We can observe that the
training set accuracy is very good, but the test set error gets
very less on further epochs. Whereas in the loss vs epochs
the training set error is very minute with low bias in training,
but in test set error it is increasing. This creates a condition
of high variance or overfitting.

Fig. 6. ResNet50 Accuracy

Figure 4 displays the model accuracy and the results gener-

ated to prove that this model is not reliable. At tenth epoch,
the difference between train accuracy and test accuracy is
huge, and the training accuracy plummets to 60%. This
information shows us that the model is facing difficulty to
classify the images.
In figure 5, the graph of the loss function (categorical
cross-entropy) and epochs are shown. The predictions in
our VGG16 model’s test set error leads to overfitting. Due
to which we have moved to ResNet50. ResNet50 offers a
Fig. 8. DenseNet121 Accuracy
V. C ONCLUSION
We proposed transfer learning-based approach for early
detection of forest fires. The proposed model successfully
classifies most of the images into two classes, fire, and no
fire. Out of VGG16, ResNet50, and DenseNet121, ResNet50

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