Project RISE: Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions
This work addresses the need for better data to support air quality advocacy and environmental justice, though it is incremental as it focuses on dataset creation rather than novel methods.
The authors tackled the problem of insufficient data for training robust computer vision models to recognize industrial smoke emissions, resulting in the creation of RISE, a large-scale video dataset with 12,567 clips from 19 camera views over 30 days across seasons, and established performance baselines using deep neural networks.
Industrial smoke emissions pose a significant concern to human health. Prior works have shown that using Computer Vision (CV) techniques to identify smoke as visual evidence can influence the attitude of regulators and empower citizens to pursue environmental justice. However, existing datasets are not of sufficient quality nor quantity to train the robust CV models needed to support air quality advocacy. We introduce RISE, the first large-scale video dataset for Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions. We adopted a citizen science approach to collaborate with local community members to annotate whether a video clip has smoke emissions. Our dataset contains 12,567 clips from 19 distinct views from cameras that monitored three industrial facilities. These daytime clips span 30 days over two years, including all four seasons. We ran experiments using deep neural networks to establish a strong performance baseline and reveal smoke recognition challenges. Our survey study discussed community feedback, and our data analysis displayed opportunities for integrating citizen scientists and crowd workers into the application of Artificial Intelligence for Social Impact.