UAV Forest Fire Detection based on RepVGG-YOLOv5

The safety of forest resources is of great im-portance to natural and public safety, and the efficient and accurate detection of forest fires is an issue of close concern. Considering the limitations of traditional forest fire detection methods, such as the limited range of view from watchtowers and insufficient resolution of satellite images, a deep learning-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) fire detection system has been proposed. With its high mobility, images of forest fires can be captured by camera-equipped UAV and transmitted to the ground station in real time. The ground station uses a deep learning object detection algorithm to achieve the recognition of fire. In this paper, we choose the state-of-the-art object detection algorithm YOLOv5 for the UAV forest fire detection scenario, and to further improve the detection performance of YOLOv5, we propose RepVGG-YOLOv5 by drawing on the RepVGG network, a training-time multi-branch topology with an inference-time plain architecture. Then we test the models on a self-built dataset, and the experimental results show that the improved RepVGG-YOLOv5 model outperforms the YOLOv5 model in terms of detection performance and detection speed, which proves the feasibility of this paper's model in the UAV forest fire detection systems and the effectiveness of the model improvement. Furthermore, the great potential of this paper's object detection model for real-time applications of accurate forest fire detection has also been demonstrated.