LRM-YOLO: A Lightweight YOLOv10n-Based Model for Forest Fire Smoke Detection in UAV Images

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gradually become an important tool for forest fire monitoring due to their flexibility and wide-area observation capability. However, existing detection algorithms still struggle to achieve a balance between computational complexity and detection performance in diverse background conditions, and data for such scenarios remain limited. Therefore, this paper proposes a lightweight forest fire smoke detection model based on YOLOv10n. Specifically, we introduce the RepViTBlock module to enhance smoke feature extraction and improve detection accuracy with low computational cost. Meanwhile, we design a Lightweight Efficient Convolutional Detection head (LECD), which improves smoke target recognition and localization while reducing the number of parameters and computational overhead of the detection head. We also adopt the Minimum Point Distance Intersection over Union (MPDIoU) as the bounding-box regression loss function to improve the localization accuracy of smoke bounding-box regression. In addition, we construct a UAV-perspective Forest Fire Smoke (UFFS) dataset, which contains typical forest fire smoke, nearby thin smoke, distant small-scale smoke, and smoke under diverse background conditions. Experiments were conducted on both the UFFS dataset and the Wildfire Smoke V1 dataset. The experimental results show that, compared with the baseline model, the proposed model reduces the number of parameters by 36.7% and GFLOPs by 42.3% on the UFFS dataset, while improving mAP50 by 1.3% and mAP50-95 by 3.7%. In addition, recall increases by 3.2% and precision increases by 3.6%, indicating an improved trade-off between detection accuracy and model complexity.