Project RISE: Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions

Abstract

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 in pursuing environmental justice. However, existing datasets do not have sufficient quality nor quantity for training robust CV models to support air quality advocacy. We introduce RISE, the first large-scale video dataset for Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions. We adopt the citizen science approach to collaborate with local community members in annotating whether a video clip has smoke emissions. Our dataset contains 12,567 clips with 19 distinct views from cameras on three sites that monitored three different industrial facilities. The clips are from 30 days that spans four seasons in two years in the daytime. We run experiments using deep neural networks developed for video action recognition to establish a performance baseline and reveal the challenges for smoke recognition. Our data analysis also shows opportunities for integrating citizen scientists and crowd workers into the application of Artificial Intelligence for social good.