ATT Squeeze U-Net: A Lightweight Network for Forest Fire Detection and Recognition

Forest fire is becoming one of the most significant natural disasters at the expense of ecology and economy. In this article, we develop an effective SqueezeNet based asymmetric encoder-decoder U-shape architecture, Attention U-Net and SqueezeNet (ATT Squeeze U-Net), mainly functions as an extractor and a discriminator of forest fire. This model takes attention mechanism to highlight useful features and suppress irrelevant contents by embedding Attention Gate (AG) units in the skip connection of U-shape structure. In this way, salient features are emphasized so that the proposed method could be competent at forest fire segmentation tasks with a small number of parameters. Specifically, we first replace classical convolution layer by a depthwise one and engage a Channel Shuffle operation as a feature communicator in the Fire module of classical SqueezeNet. Then, this modified SqueezeNet is employed as a substitution of the encoder of Attention U-Net and a corresponding DeFire module designed is combined into the decoder as well. Finally, to classify true fire, we take use of a fragment of the encoder in ATT Squeeze U-Net. The experimental results of modified SqueezeNet integrated Attention U-Net show that a competitive accuracy at 0.93 and an average prediction time at 0.89 second per image are achieved for reliable real-time forest fire detection.