A Deep-Learning-Based Approach to the Classification of Fire Types

The automatic detection of fires and the determination of their causes play a crucial role in mitigating the catastrophic consequences of such events. The literature reveals substantial research on automatic fire detection using machine learning models. However, once a fire is detected, there is a notable gap in the literature concerning the automatic classification of fire types like solid-material fires, flammable gas fires, and electric-based fires. This classification is essential for firefighters to quickly and effectively determine the most appropriate fire suppression method. This work introduces a benchmark dataset comprising over 1353 manually annotated images, classified into five categories, which is publicly released. It introduces a multiclass dataset based on the types of origins of fires. This work also presents a system incorporating eight deep-learning models evaluated for fire detection and fire-type classification. In fire-type classification, this work focuses on four fire types: solid material, chemical, electrical-based, and oil-based fires. Under the single-level, five-way classification setting, our system achieves its best performance with an accuracy score of 94.48%. Meanwhile, under the two-level classification setting, our system achieves its best performance with accuracy scores of 98.16% for fire detection and 97.55% for fire-type classification, using the DenseNet121 and EffecientNet-b0 models, respectively. The results also indicate that electrical and oil-based fires are the most challenging to detect.