Reliable Smoke Detection via Optical Flow-Guided Feature Fusion and Transformer-Based Uncertainty Modeling

Fire outbreaks pose critical threats to human life and infrastructure, necessitating high-fidelity early-warning systems that detect combustion precursors such as smoke. However, smoke plumes exhibit complex spatiotemporal dynamics influenced by illumination variability, flow kinematics, and environmental noise, undermining the reliability of traditional detectors. To address these challenges without the logistical complexity of multi-sensor arrays, we propose an information-fusion framework by integrating smoke feature representations extracted from monocular imagery. Specifically, a Two-Phase Uncertainty-Aware Shifted Windows Transformer for robust and reliable smoke detection, leveraging a novel smoke segmentation dataset, constructed via optical flow-based motion encoding, is proposed. The optical flow estimation is performed with a four-color-theorem-inspired dual-phase level-set fractional-order variational model, which preserves motion discontinuities. The resulting color-encoded optical flow maps are fused with appearance cues via a Gaussian Mixture Model to generate binary segmentation masks of the smoke regions. These fused representations are fed into the novel Shifted-Windows Transformer, which is augmented with a multi-scale uncertainty estimation head and trained under a two-phase learning regimen. First learning phase optimizes smoke detection accuracy, while during the second phase, the model learns to estimate plausibility confidence in its predictions by jointly modeling aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. Extensive experiments using multiple evaluation metrics and comparative analysis with state-of-the-art approaches demonstrate superior generalization and robustness, offering a reliable solution for early fire detection in surveillance, industrial safety, and autonomous monitoring applications.