This research presents a comprehensive assessment of the latest YOLOv8 architecture’s suitability for object detection applications, specifically adapted for smoke and wildfire recognition, with particular attention to agricultural and environmental safeguarding. Every available YOLOv8 variant underwent initial fine-tuning on a field-specific dataset that covers diverse conditions essential for robust agricultural oversight. Performance indicators led to selecting the ‘large’ model (YOLOv8l) for deeper hyperparameter tuning. This model was subjected to meticulous hyperparameter refinement via the One Factor At a Time (OFAT) strategy, zeroing in on pivotal variables such as learning rate, batch size, weight decay, epochs, and optimizer. Knowledge gained from the OFAT phase was used to define search boundaries for the subsequent Random Search (RS). The ultimate model produced through RS displayed considerable advancement over the baseline fine-tuned version, boosting overall precision by 1.39%, recall by 1.48%, F1-score by 1.44%,
[email protected] by 0.70%, and
[email protected]:0.95 by 5.09%. The improved model’s performance was confirmed across a wide range of real-world photographs depicting different agricultural landscapes, affirming its robustness in smoke and fire recognition. These outcomes underscore the model’s trustworthiness and practical value in contexts vital to agricultural protection and environmental surveillance. This investigation, marking a notable leap forward in machine learning-based fire and smoke identification, lays a firm foundation for subsequent inquiries and innovations aimed at protecting agricultural areas and natural ecosystems.