Forest fires pose a potential threat to the ecological and environmental systems and natural resources, impacting human lives. However, automated surveillance system for early forest fire detection can mitigate such calamities and protect the environment. Therefore, we propose a UAV-based forest fire fighting system with integrated artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for continuous forest surveillance and fire detection. The major contributions of the proposed research are fourfold. Firstly, we explain the detailed working mechanism along with the key steps involved in executing the UAV-based forest fire fighting system. Besides, a robust forest fire detection system requires precise and efficient classification of forest fire imagery against no-fire. Moreover, we have curated a novel dataset (DeepFire) containing diversified real-world forest imagery with and without fire to assist future research in this domain. The DeepFire dataset consists of 1900 colored images with 950 each for fire and no-fire classes. Next, we investigate the performance of various supervised machine learning classifiers for the binary classification problem of detecting forest fire. Furthermore, we propose a VGG19-based transfer learning solution to achieve improved prediction accuracy. We assess and compare the performance of several machine learning approaches such as -nearest neighbors, random forest, naive Bayes, support vector machine, logistic regression, and the proposed approach for accurately identifying fire and no-fire images in the DeepFire dataset. The simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach in terms of accurate classification, where it achieves the mean accuracy of 95% with 95.7% precision and 94.2% recall.

Forests are a vital natural resource that directly influences the ecosystem. Recently, forest fire has been a serious issue due to natural and man-made climate effects. For early forest fire detection, an artificial intelligence-based forest fire detection method in smart city application is presented to avoid major disasters. This research presents a review of the vision-based forest fire localization and classification methods. Furthermore, this work makes use of the forest fire detection dataset, which solves the classification problem of discriminating fire and no-fire images. This work proposes a deep learning method named FFireNet, by leveraging the pre-trained convolutional base of the MobileNetV2 model and adding fully connected layers to solve the new task, that is, the forest fire recognition problem, which helps in classifying images as forest fires based on extracted features which are symmetrical. The performance of the proposed solution for classifying fire and no-fire was evaluated using different performance metrics and compared with other CNN models. The results show that the proposed approach achieves 98.42% accuracy, 1.58% error rate, 99.47% recall, and 97.42% precision in classifying the fire and no-fire images. The outcomes of the proposed approach are promising for the forest fire classification problem considering the unique forest fire detection dataset.

Over the past few decades, skin cancer has emerged as a major global health concern. The efficacy of skin cancer treatment greatly depends upon early diagnosis and effective treatment. The automated classification of Melanoma and Nonmelanoma is quite challenging task due to presence of high visual similarities across different classes and variabilities within each class. According to the best of our knowledge, this study represents the classification of Melanoma and Nonmelanoma utilising Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC) and Squamous Cell Carcinoma (SCC) under the Nonmelanoma class for the first time. Therefore, this research focuses on automated detection of different skin cancer types to provide assistance to the dermatologists in timely diagnosis and treatment of Melanoma and Nonmelanoma patients. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) methods have gained popularity where Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are employed to accurately classify various skin diseases. However, CNN has limitation in its ability to capture global contextual information which may lead to missing important information. In order to address this issue, this research explores the outlook attention mechanism inspired by vision outlooker, which improves important features while suppressing noisy features. The proposed SkinViT architecture integrates an outlooker block, transformer block and MLP head block to efficiently capture both fine level and global features in order to enhance the accuracy of Melanoma and Nonmelanoma classification. The proposed SkinViT method is assessed by different performance metrics such as recall, precision, classification accuracy, and F1 score. We performed extensive experiments on three datasets, Dataset1 which is extracted from ISIC2019, Dataset2 collected from various online dermatological database and Dataset3 combines both datasets. The proposed SkinViT achieved 0.9109 accuracy on Dataset1, 0.8911 accuracy on Dataset3 and 0.8611 accuracy on Dataset2. Moreover, the proposed SkinViT method outperformed other SOTA models and displayed higher accuracy compared to the previous work in the literature. The proposed method demonstrated higher performance efficiency in classification of Melanoma and Nonmelanoma dermoscopic images. This work is expected to inspire further research in implementing a system for detecting skin cancer that can assist dermatologists in timely diagnosing Melanoma and Nonmelanoma patients.

To better regulate smoking in no-smoking areas, we present a novel AI-based surveillance system for smart cities. In this paper, we intend to solve the issue of no-smoking area surveillance by introducing a framework for an AI-based smoker detection system for no-smoking areas in a smart city. Moreover, this research will provide a dataset for smoker detection problems in indoor and outdoor environments to help future research on this AI-based smoker detection system. The newly curated smoker detection image dataset consists of two classes, Smoking and NotSmoking. Further, to classify the Smoking and NotSmoking images, we have proposed a transfer learning-based solution using the pre-trained InceptionResNetV2 model. The performance of the proposed approach for predicting smokers and not-smokers was evaluated and compared with other CNN methods on different performance metrics. The proposed approach achieved an accuracy of 96.87% with 97.32% precision and 96.46% recall in predicting the Smoking and NotSmoking images on a challenging and diverse newly-created dataset. Although, we trained the proposed method on the image dataset, we believe the performance of the system will not be affected in real-time.