Real-Time Fire Detection Method for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Based on Machine Vision

During the charging process of electric vehicles (EV), the circuit inside the charger plug is connected in series, the charger input voltage does not match the rated input voltage, the temperature caused by the severe heating of the charging time is too high for too long, and other factors are very likely to trigger a fire in the vehicle charging pile. In this paper, an improved You Only Look Once v4 (YOLOv4) real-time target detection algorithm based on machine vision is proposed to monitor the site based on existing monitoring equipment, transmit live video information in real-time, expand the monitoring range, and significantly reduce the cost of use. During the experiment, the improved neural network model was trained by a homemade fire video image dataset, and a K-means clustering algorithm iwasintroduced to recalculate the anchor frame size for the specific object of flame; the existing dataset was used to perform multiple divisions by using a tenfold cross-validation algorithm, thus avoiding the selection of chance hyperparameters and models that do not have generalization ability because of special divisions. The experimental results show that the improved algorithm is fast and accurate in detecting large-size flames in real-time and small-size flames at the beginning of a fire, with a detection speed of 43 fps/s, mAP value of 91.53%, and F1 value of 0.91. Compared with YOLOv3 and YOLOv4 models, the improved model is sensitive to detecting different sizes of flames. It can suppress false alarms well in a variety of complex lighting environments. The prediction frame size fits the area where the target is located, the detection accuracy remains stable, and the comprehensive performance of the network model is significantly improved to meet the demand of real-time monitoring. It is significant for developing the EV industry and enhancing emergency response capability.

Automated summary

In this study, an improved machine vision algorithm was proposed to monitor the charging site of electric vehicles in real-time. The algorithm achieved fast and accurate detection of flames of different sizes, and effectively suppressed false alarms in various complex lighting environments.