Fire detection in smart cities requires intelligent visual recognition systems capable of distinguishing fire from visually similar phenomena while maintaining real-time performance under diverse environmental conditions. Existing deep learning approaches employ attention mechanisms that aggregate spatial information isotropically, failing to capture the inherently directional characteristics of fire and smoke patterns. This paper presents DirFireNet, a novel fire detection framework that exploits directional fire dynamics through Strip Pooling Coordinate Attention (SPCA). Unlike conventional attention mechanisms, DirFireNet explicitly models vertical flame propagation and horizontal smoke d... More >