Towards automatic smoke detector inspection: Recognition of the smoke detectors in industrial facilities and preparation for future drone integration
Authors: Lukas Kratochvila, Jakub Stefansky, Simon Bilik, Robert Rous, Tomas Zemcik, Michal Wolny, Frantisek Rusnak, Ondrej Cech, Karel Horak
Organizations: Department of Control and Instrumentation, Brno University of Technology, Brno, Czech Republic · Department of Cybernetics and Biomedical Engineering, VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic · Institute for Research and Applications of Fuzzy Modeling, University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic · Department of Informatics, Mendel University in Brno, Brno, Czech Republic · Department of Electrical and Electronic Technology, Brno University of Technology, Brno, Czech Republic
Fire safety consists of a complex pipeline, and it is a very important topic of concern. One of its frontal parts are the smoke detectors, which are supposed to provide an alarm prior to a massive fire appears. As they are often difficult to reach due to high ceilings or problematic locations, an automatic inspection system would be very beneficial as it could allow faster revisions, prevent workers from dangerous work in heights, and make the whole process cheaper. In this study, we present the smoke detector recognition part of the automatic inspection system, which could easily be integrated to the drone system. As part of our research, we compare two popular convolutional-based object detectors YOLOv11 and SSD widely used on embedded devices together with the state-of-the-art transformer-based RT-DETRv2 with the backbones of different sizes. Due to a complicated way of collecting a sufficient amount of data for training in the real-world environment, we also compare several training strategies using the real and semi-synthetic data together with various augmentation methods. To achieve a robust testing, all models were evaluated on two test datasets with an expected and difficult appearance of the smoke detectors including motion blur, small resolution, or not complete objects. The best performing detector is the YOLOv11n, which reaches the average [email protected] score of 0.884. Our code, pretrained models and dataset are publicly available.
Figures & tables
Figure 1
Dataset
Real-Normal
Real-Difficult
Gen-Real
Gen-Render
Train ( R + G )
1004
-
1536
1536
Valid ( R + G )
334
-
384
384
Test ( R + R )
334
127
-
-
TABLE I : Image counts and portions of real and generated data in the experimental datasets.
Hyperparameter
YOLOv11
RT-DETRv2
SSD
Image size
640x640
640x640
300x300
Number of epochs
120
120
120
Batch size
16
16
16
Optimizer
AdamW
AdamW
SGD
Learning rate
7×10−4
2×10−5
1.5×10−3
Weight decay
5×10−4
2×10−4
2×10−5
TABLE II : Training hyperparameters of the selected models.
rPi type
CPU
Core
Frequency [MHz]
GPU
Raspberry Pi 4B
Broadcom BCM2711
Cortex-A72
1500
VideoCore VI
Raspberry Pi 5
Broadcom BCM2712
Cortex-A76
2400
VideoCore VII
TABLE III : Parameters of the evaluated rPi embedded computers
In various industries, smoke and fire are two of the most important threats in the workplace. One of the common methods for detecting smoke and fire is the use of infrared thermal and smoke sensors, which cannot be used in outdoor applications. Therefore, the use of vision-based methods seems necessary. The problem of smoke and fire detection is spatiotemporal and requires spatiotemporal solutions. This paper presents a method that uses spatial features along with temporal-based features to detect smoke and fire in the scene. It consists of three main parts; the task of each part is to reduce the error of the previous part so that the final model has a robust performance. This method also uses transformer modules to increase the accuracy of the model. The results of our model show the proper performance of the proposed approach in solving the problem of smoke and fire detection and can be used to increase workplace safety.
Alireza Mirrashid, Mohammad Khoshbin, Ali Atghaei +1
The development of vision-based wildfire detection systems for unmanned aerial vehicles is constrained by the limited availability of diverse real-world training images. This paper investigates the impact of dataset composition on embedded real-time UAV wildfire detection using compact YOLO models as a controlled validation family. Four training configurations were evaluated: real non-augmented, real augmented, hybrid non-augmented, and hybrid augmented, where the hybrid sets combine real wildfire images with AI-generated samples. The objective is to determine whether synthetic data mixing and image augmentation improve practical detection performance under resource-constrained deployment conditions. Experimental results show that the best overall operating point was obtained with the real non-augmented dataset, which achieved the strongest balance between recall and mean average precision for UAV-based wildfire detection. The results also show that neither hybridization with synthetic data nor augmentation produced a better final deployment choice. These findings suggest that, for embedded UAV wildfire detection, dataset realism and domain alignment are more valuable than increasing training set size through synthetic expansion.
Eduardo de los Santos, Andre S. Kelbouscas, Ricardo B. Grando +1
Robotics and AI Lab, Technological University of Uruguay, Rivera, Uruguay
This study proposes an enhanced dual-model YOLOv8 framework for intelligent fire detection and proximity-aware risk assessment, extending conventional vision-based monitoring beyond simple detection to actionable hazard prioritization. The system is trained on a dataset of 9,860 annotated images to segment fire and smoke across complex environments. The framework combines a primary YOLOv8 instance segmentation model for fire and smoke detection with a secondary object detection model pretrained on the COCO dataset to identify surrounding entities such as people, vehicles, and infrastructure. By integrating the outputs of both models, the system computes pixel-based distances between detected fire regions and nearby objects and converts these values into approximate real-world measurements using a pixel-to-meter scaling approach. This proximity information is incorporated into a risk assessment mechanism that combines fire evidence, object vulnerability, and distance-based exposure to produce a quantitative risk score and alert level. The proposed framework achieves strong performance, with precision, recall, and F1 scores exceeding 90% and [email protected] above 91%. The system generates annotated visual outputs showing fire locations, detected objects, estimated distances, and contextual risk information to support situational awareness. Implemented using open-source tools within the Google Colab environment, the framework is lightweight and suitable for deployment in industrial and resource-constrained settings.
Ammar K. AlMhdawi, Nonso Nnamoko, Alaa Mashan Ubaid
University of Greater Manchester, A676 Deane Rd, Bolton, BL3 5AB, , UK · Edge Hill University, St Helens Rd, Ormskirk, L39 4QP, , UK · University of Khorfakkan, Al Jaradia , Sharjah, 887W+2P2, , UAE