Fire detection using DCNN for assisting visually impaired people in IoT service environment

In an emergency, such as fire in a building, visually impaired people are prone to danger more than non-impaired people, for they cannot be aware of it quickly. Current fire detection methods such as smoke detector is very slow and unreliable. But by using vision sensor instead, fire can be proven to be detected much faster as shown in our experiments. Previous studies have applied various image processing and machine learning techniques to detect fire, but they usually don’t generalize well because those techniques use hand-crafted features. With the recent advancements in the field of deep learning, this research can be conducted to help solve the problem by using deep learning-based object detector to detect fire. Such approach can learn features automatically, so they can usually generalize well to various scenes. We introduced two object detection models (R1 and R2) with slightly different model’s complexity. R1 can detect fire at 90% average precision and 85% recall at 33 FPS, while R2 has 90% average precision and 61% recall at 50 FPS. The reason why we introduced two models is because we want to have a benchmark comparison as no other research on fire detection with similar techniques exists. We also want to give two model choices when we wish to integrate the model into an IoT platform.