CHAI: Craters in Historical Aerial Images

Abstract

In this paper we highlight the importance of historical aerial images in better understanding past events and their impact on their surroundings. More specifically, we are interested in studying bomb craters from World War II in Central Europe. We note the scarcity of publicly accessible datasets that provide labeled bomb craters and subsequently introduce a novel, domain-expert-annotated dataset comprised of 99 historical aerial images of Austria and Germany. We divide said data into training, validation, and test sets, and conduct training and evaluation using different object detectors - both general-purpose and specifically designed for remote sensing applications. This dataset thus serves as a benchmark for developing and evaluating (several) algorithms dedicated to the automated detection and analysis of bomb craters in historical aerial images. We underscore the uniqueness of this dataset as the first publicly available resource containing annotated bomb craters, thereby offering researchers a valueable and novel opportunity for future exploration. Lastly, we investigate possibilities for extending and enriching our data to enhance future studies, particularly within the context of preliminary risk estimation for unexploded bombs.