Fire and smoke detection from videos: A literature review under a novel taxonomy

The recent development of deep learning based fire detection techniques and the availability of smart cameras able to execute these algorithms on the edge paved the way for sophisticated and efficient video-based firefighting systems. However, the limited available data to train these algorithms cast shadows on their robustness and generalization capability. In this survey, we review 153 papers published in the literature and 17 publicly available fire detection datasets with the aim of identifying application scenarios that better describe real-world fire detection challenges. In the proposed taxonomy, these are characterized by two features: i) the fire size in the framed scene that depends on several parameters, foremost the distance from the fire but also the camera optic; ii) the background activity, due to the presence of moving objects that may mislead the detector. On this basis, we analyzed the existing methods under a common scheme according to this new taxonomy and matched the solutions with the needs of specific application scenarios. Similarly, for 9 interesting video datasets acquired from cameras, we labeled 536 videos according to the proposed taxonomy and shared these annotations with the community. The aim of this fire detection review is two-fold: on one hand, we classify the existing scientific works according to the real application scenarios, determining the features that are promising in specific operative conditions; on the other hand, we provide a detailed analysis and annotation of available datasets to promote the development of more reliable validation protocols and the collection of data from missing scenarios.