Gardens Fire Detection Based on the Symmetrical SSS-YOLOv8 Network

Fire detection primarily relies on sensors such as smoke detectors, heat detectors, and flame detectors. However, due to cost constraints, it is impractical to deploy such a large number of sensors for fire detection in outdoor gardens and landscapes. To address this challenge and aiming to enhance fire detection accuracy in gardens while achieving lightweight design, this paper proposes an improved symmetry SSS-YOLOv8 model for lightweight fire detection in garden video surveillance. Firstly, the SPDConv layer from ShuffleNetV2 is used to preserve flame or smoke information, combined with the Conv_Maxpool layer to reduce computational complexity. Subsequently, the SE module is introduced into the backbone feature extraction network to enhance features specific to fire and smoke. ShuffleNetV2 and the SE module are configured into a symmetric local network structure to enhance the extraction of flame or smoke features. Finally, WIoU is introduced as the bounding box regression loss function to further ensure the detection performance of the symmetry SSS-YOLOv8 model. Experimental results demonstrate that the improved symmetry SSS-YOLOv8 model achieves precision and recall rates for garden flame and smoke detection both exceeding 0.70. Compared to the YOLOv8n model, it exhibits a 2.1 percentage point increase in mAP, while its parameter is only 1.99 M, reduced to 65.7% of the original model. The proposed model demonstrates superior detection accuracy for garden fires compared to other YOLO series models of the same type, as well as different types of SSD and Faster R-CNN models.