# Real-Time Aerial Fire Detection on Resource-Constrained Devices Using Knowledge Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20979 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20979/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Distillation from A Stronger Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10536/) (2022)
- [One-for-All: Bridge the Gap Between Heterogeneous Architectures in Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19444/) (2023)
- [BoWFire: Detection of Fire in Still Images by Integrating Pixel Color and Texture Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03495/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [EarthSight: A Distributed Framework for Low-Latency Satellite Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10834/) (2025)
- [WISE: A Lightweight, Weakly-Supervised Model for Onboard Fire Smoke Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18227/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Wildfire catastrophes cause significant environmental degradation, human losses, and financial damage. To mitigate these severe impacts, early fire detection and warning systems are crucial. Current systems rely primarily on fixed CCTV cameras with a limited field of view, restricting their effectiveness in large outdoor environments. The fusion of intelligent fire detection with remote sensing improves coverage and mobility, enabling monitoring in remote and challenging areas. Existing approaches predominantly utilize convolutional neural networks and vision transformer models. While these architectures provide high accuracy in fire detection, their computational complexity limits real-time performance on edge devices such as UAVs. In our work, we present a lightweight fire detection model based on MobileViT-S, compressed through the distillation of knowledge from a stronger teacher model. The ablation study highlights the impact of a teacher model and the chosen distillation technique on the model's performance improvement. We generate activation map visualizations using Grad-CAM to confirm the model's ability to focus on relevant fire regions. The high accuracy and efficiency of the proposed model make it well-suited for deployment on satellites, UAVs, and IoT devices for effective fire detection. Experiments on common fire benchmarks demonstrate that our model suppresses the state-of-the-art model by 0.44%, 2.00% while maintaining a compact model size. Our model delivers the highest processing speed among existing works, achieving real-time performance on resource-constrained devices.