Edge-Friendly UAV Wildfire Smoke and Flame Detection Using Transfer Learning-Enhanced Lightweight Deep Learning Models

Edge computing on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) enables low-latency wildfire monitoring by performing visual inference onboard; however, practical deployment is constrained by limited labeled data and resource budgets that often preclude reliance on large GPU servers. This work investigates transfer learning (TL) for UAV-based wildfire smoke and flame detection and evaluates its impact on both detection accuracy and edge deployment performance. We introduce the Aerial Fire and Smoke Essential (AFSE) dataset (282 aerial-view images; classes—smoke and fire), compiled from publicly available wildfire footage and FLAME2. Lightweight YOLO models are fine-tuned using heterogeneous (MS COCO) and homogeneous (FASDD) source pretraining and are assessed using [email protected] together with frames per second (FPS), average inference power, energy consumption, and the normalized energy–delay product (EDP) on an edge computing platform. Results show that TL substantially improves detection accuracy on AFSE, achieving up to 79.2% [email protected], while reducing training time, and improving cross-validation stability. On the tested edge platform, TL does not materially change inference speed or energy use, indicating that accuracy gains from TL do not automatically translate to improved efficiency without additional optimization. Among the evaluated lightweight detectors, YOLOv5n achieves the best [email protected] while maintaining the highest edge device throughput, processing images nearly twice as fast as YOLO11n without hardware acceleration. More broadly, the measured throughput and energy differences among lightweight YOLO variants show that edge model selection should be guided by application-specific accuracy, latency, and energy constraints.