A few-shot target detection method for wildfires: Research example of Fujian Province, China

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote-sensing images have a wide range of applications in wildfire monitoring, providing invaluable data for early detection and effective management. This paper proposes an improved few-shot target detection algorithm tailored specifically for wildfire detection. The quality of UAV remote-sensing images is significantly improved by utilizing image enhancement techniques such as Gamma change and Wiener filter, thereby enhancing the accuracy of the detection model. Additionally, ConvNeXt-ECA is used to focus on valid information within the images, which is an improvement of ConvNeXt with the addition of the ECANet attention mechanism. Furthermore, multi-scale feature fusion is performed by adding a feature pyramid network (FPN) to optimize the extracted small target features. The experimental results demonstrate that the improved algorithm achieves a detection accuracy of 93.2%, surpassing Faster R-CNN by 6.6%. Moreover, the improved algorithm outperforms other target detection algorithms YOLOv8, RT-DETR, YoloX, and SSD by 3.4%, 6.4%, 7.6% and 21.1% respectively. This highlights its superior recognition accuracy and robustness in wildfire detection tasks.