An Ultra-Low-Power Embedded AI Fire Detection and Crowd Counting System for Indoor Areas

Fire incidents in residential and industrial areas is often the cause of human casualties and property damage. Although there are existing systems that detect fire and monitor the presence of people in indoor areas, research on their implementation in embedded platforms is limited. This paper introduces an ultra-low-power embedded system for fire detection and crowd counting using efficient deep learning methods. For the prediction of fire occurrences, environmental and gas sensor along with multilayer perceptron nodes are used. For crowd counting, a custom lightweight version of YOLOv5 is introduced, using an architecture based on ShuffleNetV2, resulting in a model with low memory requirements, high accuracy predictions and fast inference on an embedded platform. The accuracy, power consumption and memory requirements of the proposed system are evaluated using public datasets and datasets acquired by the environmental and image sensors and its performance is compared to that of existing approaches.