Fire-YOLO26: an NMS-free dual-stream RGB–thermal network for real-time UAV forest fire detection in smoke-challenging conditions

Early and reliable forest fire detection is essential for ecological security and emergency response, yet UAV-based detectors often suffer from NMS-induced latency and modality-specific failures under smoke occlusion and thermal distractors. This study proposes Fire-YOLO26, an end-to-end NMS-free dual-stream RGB–thermal infrared (TIR) network built on YOLO26 for real-time UAV fire monitoring. A parallel RGB–TIR backbone preserves one-to-one matching inference, while a Thermal-guided Feature Alig