Comparative Analysis of CNN and Transformer Architectures for Real-Time Fire and Smoke Detection

Real-time automatic detection of fire and smoke is a critical component of modern safety systems in surveillance, industrial, and environmental-protection applications, where conventional sensor-based systems show fundamental limitations. In this paper, a comparative analysis of four deep-learning architectures—DETR, Faster R-CNN (ResNet-50-FPN), Faster R-CNN (MobileNetV2), and RetinaNet—was conducted on a heterogeneous corpus of 67,765 annotated images originating from four different datasets. All models shared the same data-preparation, augmentation, and evaluation pipeline, while each was trained with the default configuration of its reference implementation; the comparison therefore reflects each architecture as it is typically deployed rather than a comparison under a single unified training budget. Faster R-CNN with the ResNet-50-FPN backbone achieved the highest accuracy ([email protected] = 78.7% on the Indoor set; 73.8% on the SmokeAndFire set) and the highest mean [email protected] across all datasets (48.7%), obtained with an inference speed of 76.9 FPS and a latency of 13.5 ms on NVIDIA RTX 4090 hardware, which makes it a promising candidate for real-time fire-detection systems on comparable hardware. The main contribution of this work is a unified evaluation of four representative object-detection architectures across four heterogeneous fire-and-smoke datasets. The study further quantifies the performance asymmetry between fire and smoke detection through a normalized morphological asymmetry index, reflecting the consistently lower detection accuracy achieved for smoke owing to its diffuse and semi-transparent appearance, and provides practical guidelines for selecting an architecture according to real-time deployment requirements. Because each configuration was trained once with a fixed random seed and all speed measurements were obtained on a single desktop GPU, the reported differences are interpreted descriptively; their statistical validation, cross-dataset evaluation, and measurement on embedded hardware are identified as future work.