AusSmoke meets MultiNatSmoke: a fully-labelled diverse smoke segmentation dataset
Authors: Weihao Li, Hongjin Zhao, Gao Zhu, Ge-Peng Ji, Nicholas Wilson, Marta Yebra, Nick Barnes
Organizations: Bushfire Research Centre of Excellence, Australian National University
Abstract
Wildfires are an escalating global concern due to the devastating impacts on the environment, economy, and human health, with notable incidents such as the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires and the 2025 California wildfires underscoring the severity of these events. AI-enabled camera-based smoke detection has emerged as a promising approach for the rapid detection of wildfires. However, existing wildfire smoke segmentation datasets that are used for training detection and segmentation models are limited in scale, geographically constrained, and often rely on synthetic imagery, which hinders effective training and generalization. To overcome these limitations, we present AusSmoke, a new smoke segmentation dataset collected from Australia to address the data scarcity in this region. Furthermore, we introduce a MultiNational geographically diverse and substantially larger fully-labelled benchmark, called MultiNatSmoke, that consolidates publicly available international datasets with the newly collected Australian imagery, expanding the scale by an order of magnitude over previous collections. Finally, we benchmark smoke segmentation models, demonstrating improved performance and enhanced generalization across diverse geographical contexts. The project is available at \href{https://github.com/henryzhao0615/MultiNatSmoke}{Github}.
Wildfire detection and monitoring are critical for mitigating fire spread and reducing environmental and infrastructural damage. In this work, we introduce GWFP (Global Wildfire Prevention Dataset), a large-scale, open-source dataset of wildfire images and videos designed to support early fire and smoke detection research. GWFP contains geographically diverse wildfire scenes, including flames, smoke, Waterdog/Fog environmental conditions, Near Infrared (NIR) imagery, Ember, and challenging negative samples collected from real-world scenarios worldwide. To evaluate dataset robustness and cross-domain generalization, we benchmark multiple convolutional and transformer-based architectures across both in-domain and cross-dataset settings. Additionally, we explore lightweight frequency--spatial feature interaction using Hadamard-enhanced residual connections (HTE-ResNet) to analyze representation robustness under domain-shift conditions. Experimental results demonstrate strong cross-dataset generalization and practical utility for real-world wildfire monitoring applications. The dataset and source code will be publicly released upon acceptance.
This article describes an open image dataset for developing and evaluating active-fire segmentation methods in satellite imagery. The dataset contains 2,148 image-mask pairs from 25 California wildfires, with acquisitions spanning July 2020 to August 2026. Each image is a 512x512-pixel, three-channel composite derived from Sentinel-2 Level-2A bands B12, B11 and B8A at 20 m spatial sampling. A fixed linear rendering is applied throughout the dataset. Corresponding masks distinguish background, SWIR-rule active fire and invalid observations. The masks were generated from shortwave-infrared brightness and near-infrared contrast, followed by constrained neighborhood growth. The release includes chip-level metadata and an incident-disjoint partition containing 18 training, three validation and four test fires. Among the image pairs, 841 contain active-fire labels; these labels occupy 0.0766% of all grid cells. A mask-blind analyst review covers 233 test chips and provides a separate assessment of the rule-generated labels at chip and connected-component levels. Reference training and evaluation code accompanies the data, including a ResNet-34 U-Net implementation with validation-based checkpoint and threshold selection. The archived images, masks, metadata and review annotations support research on rare-class segmentation, learning from algorithmic labels and transfer across fire incidents. The versioned dataset is deposited on Zenodo, with preparation and reuse software maintained in a public GitHub repository.
The increasing accessibility of radiometric thermal imaging sensors for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offers significant potential for advancing AI-driven aerial wildfire management. Radiometric imaging provides per-pixel temperature estimates, a valuable improvement over non-radiometric data that requires irradiance measurements to be converted into visible images using RGB color palettes. Despite its benefits, this technology has been underutilized largely due to a lack of available data for researchers. This study addresses this gap by introducing methods for collecting and processing synchronized visual spectrum and radiometric thermal imagery using UAVs at prescribed fires. The included imagery processing pipeline drastically simplifies and partially automates each step from data collection to neural network input. Further, we present the FLAME 3 dataset, the first comprehensive collection of side-by-side visual spectrum and radiometric thermal imagery of wildland fires. Building on our previous FLAME 1 and FLAME 2 datasets, FLAME 3 includes radiometric thermal Tag Image File Format (TIFFs) and nadir thermal plots, providing a new data type and collection method. This dataset aims to spur a new generation of machine learning models utilizing radiometric thermal imagery, potentially trivializing tasks such as aerial wildfire detection, segmentation, and assessment. A single-burn subset of FLAME 3 for computer vision applications is available on Kaggle with the full 6 burn set available to readers upon request.