AirBirds: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for Bird Strike Prevention in Real-world Airports
This dataset addresses a critical problem for aviation safety by providing a resource for researchers and practitioners to develop better bird strike prevention methods, though it is incremental as it focuses on data collection rather than new algorithms.
The authors tackled the lack of a large-scale dataset for bird strike prevention by presenting AirBirds, a dataset of 118,312 time-series images with 409,967 bounding boxes of flying birds captured at a real-world airport over four seasons.
One fundamental limitation to the research of bird strike prevention is the lack of a large-scale dataset taken directly from real-world airports. Existing relevant datasets are either small in size or not dedicated for this purpose. To advance the research and practical solutions for bird strike prevention, in this paper, we present a large-scale challenging dataset AirBirds that consists of 118,312 time-series images, where a total of 409,967 bounding boxes of flying birds are manually, carefully annotated. The average size of all annotated instances is smaller than 10 pixels in 1920x1080 images. Images in the dataset are captured over 4 seasons of a whole year by a network of cameras deployed at a real-world airport, covering diverse bird species, lighting conditions and 13 meteorological scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first large-scale image dataset that directly collects flying birds in real-world airports for bird strike prevention. This dataset is publicly available at https://airbirdsdata.github.io/.