Authorities and policymakers in Korea have recently prioritized improving fire prevention and emergency response. Governments seek to enhance community safety for residents by constructing automated fire detection and identification systems. This study examined the efficacy of YOLOv6, a system for object identification running on an NVIDIA GPU platform, to identify fire-related items. Using metrics such as object identification speed, accuracy research, and time-sensitive real-world applications, we analyzed the influence of YOLOv6 on fire detection and identification efforts in Korea. We conducted trials using a fire dataset comprising 4000 photos collected through Google, YouTube, and other resources to evaluate the viability of YOLOv6 in fire recognition and detection tasks. According to the findings, YOLOv6’s object identification performance was 0.98, with a typical recall of 0.96 and a precision of 0.83. The system achieved an MAE of 0.302%. These findings suggest that YOLOv6 is an effective technique for detecting and identifying fire-related items in photos in Korea. Multi-class object recognition using random forests, k-nearest neighbors, support vector, logistic regression, naive Bayes, and XGBoost was performed on the SFSC data to evaluate the system’s capacity to identify fire-related objects. The results demonstrate that for fire-related objects, XGBoost achieved the highest object identification accuracy, with values of 0.717 and 0.767. This was followed by random forest, with values of 0.468 and 0.510. Finally, we tested YOLOv6 in a simulated fire evacuation scenario to gauge its practicality in emergencies. The results show that YOLOv6 can accurately identify fire-related items in real time within a response time of 0.66 s. Therefore, YOLOv6 is a viable option for fire detection and recognition in Korea. The XGBoost classifier provides the highest accuracy when attempting to identify objects, achieving remarkable results. Furthermore, the system accurately identifies fire-related objects while they are being detected in real-time. This makes YOLOv6 an effective tool to use in fire detection and identification initiatives.