AIDER (Aerial Image Dataset for Emergency Response Applications)

AIDER (Aerial Image Dataset for Emergency Response applications): The dataset construction involved manually collecting all images for four disaster events, namely Fire/Smoke, Flood, Collapsed Building/Rubble, and Traffic Accidents, as well as one class for the Normal case.

The aerial images for the disaster events were collected through various online sources (e.g. google images, bing images, youtube, news agencies web sites, etc.) using the keywords ”Aerial View” or ”UAV” or”Drone” and an event such as Fire”,”Earthquake”,”Highway accident”, etc. Images are initially of different sizes but are standardized prior to training. All images where manually inspected to first contain the event that was of interested and then to have the event centered at the image so that any geometric transformations during augmentation would not remove it from the image view. During the data collection process the various disaster events were captured with different resolutions and under various condition with regards to illumination and viewpoint. Finally, to replicate real world scenarios the dataset is imbalanced in the sense that it contains more images from the Normal class.

This subset includes around 500 images for each disaster class and over 4000 images for the normal class. This makes it an imbalanced classification problem.

It is advised to further enhance the dataset that random augmentations are probabilistically applied to each image prior to adding it to the batch for training. Specifically there are a number of possible transformations such as geometric (rotations, translations, horizontal axis mirroring, cropping and zooming), as well as image manipulations (illumination changes, color shifting, blurring, sharpening, and shadowing).