Improved Flame Detection Method of Fuel Cell Microgrid in YOLOv5s

Abstract Fuel cell microgrid, as an efficient and clean energy system, are widely used in industrial, commercial and residential sectors. However, due to the complexity of their operating environment, there are certain safety hazards, especially the risk of fire. Traditional fuel cell microgrid fire detection has weak ability to adapt to complex scenes, poor interactivity, untimely flame detection and cannot give detailed information about the fire, and target detection is difficult to detect small target flames. Aiming at the above problems, this paper proposes an improved flame detection algorithm for fuel cell microgrids with YOLOv5s, which can effectively reduce the interference of complex environment on flame detection and significantly improve the small target detection capability. In this study, the attention mechanism FLA (focused linear attention) is firstly added to YOLOv5s backbone network, which helps the network model to extract the flame multi-scale spatial information and important features more fully. Next, the Neck part of the neck network is improved by incorporating the weighted BiFPN (bidirectional feature pyramid network) structure to improve the small target detection capability and feature fusion capability. Then WloU (wise inter-section over union) as a new bounding box loss function to enhance the model generalisation ability. Finally, the inter-frame difference method is added to the detection head part of the model, which makes it able to effectively distinguish non-flame units when applied to flame detection cameras. Comparative experiments on the flame detection dataset show that the improved model improves the precision by 11.3%, the accuracy by 12.6%, and the recall by 3.8%.Moreover, the detection method proposed in this study has significantly enhanced detection capability for small target flames, and can be connected to detection cameras and alarm systems for effective detection of fuel cell microgrids, which can help to improve hydrogen energy safety and promote the demonstration application of fuel cell microgrids.