Agricultural fires significantly threaten global food systems, ecosystems, and rural economies, necessitating timely detection to prevent widespread damage. This study presents a lightweight and enhanced version of the YOLOv5s model, optimized for early-stage agricultural fire detection. The core innovation involves deepening the C3 block and integrating DarknetBottleneck modules to extract finer visual features from subtle fire indicators such as light smoke and small flames. Experimental evaluations were conducted on a custom dataset of 3200 annotated agricultural fire images. The proposed model achieved a precision of 88.9%, a recall of 85.7%, and a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 87.3%, outperforming baseline YOLOv5s and several state-of-the-art (SOTA) detectors such as YOLOv7-tiny and YOLOv8n. The model maintains a compact size (7.5 M parameters) and real-time capability (74 FPS), making it suitable for resource-constrained deployment. Our findings demonstrate that focused architectural refinement can significantly improve early fire detection accuracy, enabling more effective response strategies and reducing agricultural losses.

The detection of ship fires is a critical aspect of maritime safety and surveillance, demanding high accuracy in both identification and response mechanisms. However, the scarcity of ship fire images poses a significant challenge to the development and training of effective machine learning models. This research paper addresses this challenge by exploring advanced data augmentation techniques aimed at enhancing the training datasets for ship and ship fire detection. We have curated a dataset comprising ship images (both fire and non-fire) and various oceanic images, which serve as target and source images. By employing diverse image blending methods, we randomly integrate target images of ships with source images of oceanic environments under various conditions, such as windy, rainy, hazy, cloudy, or open-sky scenarios. This approach not only increases the quantity but also the diversity of the training data, thus improving the robustness and performance of machine learning models in detecting ship fires across different contexts. Furthermore, we developed a Gradio web interface application that facilitates selective augmentation of images. The key contribution of this work is related to object extraction-based blending. We propose basic and advanced data augmentation techniques while applying blending and selective randomness. Overall, we cover eight critical steps for dataset creation. We collected 9200 ship fire and 4100 ship non-fire images. From the images, we augmented 90 ship fire images with 13 background images and achieved 11,440 augmented images. To test the augmented dataset performance, we trained Yolo-v8 and Yolo-v10 models with “Fire” and “No-fire” augmented ship images. In the Yolo-v8 case, the precision-recall curve achieved 96.6% (Fire), 98.2% (No-fire), and 97.4% mAP score achievement in all classes at a 0.5 rate. In Yolo-v10 model training achievement, we got 90.3% (Fire), 93.7 (No-fire), and 92% mAP score achievement in all classes at 0.5 rate. In comparison, both trained models’ performance is outperforming other Yolo-based SOTA ship fire detection models in overall and mAP scores.