Hyperparameter tuning of MobileNetV2 on forest and land fire severity classification

Abstract

Forest and land fires pose significant environmental challenges, causing economic and ecological damage depending on their severity. This study proposes a deep learning-based classification model to assess fire severity using the MobileNetV2 architecture. A dataset of 560 post-fire images was categorized into five severity levels, with dataset preprocessing involving resizing, rescaling, and image augmentation. To enhance model performance, K-means clustering was applied for balanced data distribution across classes. The model was trained using grid search for hyperparameter tuning, with the optimal combination being a batch size of 8, learning rate of 0.0001, and dropout of 0.3. Training was conducted in 50 epochs, and evaluation using the confusion matrix demonstrated an accuracy of 85%, precision of 86%, and recall of 81%. The results indicate that MobileNetV2 effectively classifies post-fire severity levels, offering a reliable tool for post-disaster assessment. This study highlights the significance of dataset preprocessing and hyperparameter tuning in improving model accuracy. Future research should explore alternative architectures and expand the dataset to enhance model generalization. These findings can aid authorities in assessing fire impact, supporting mitigation strategies, and improving post-fire land management.