Urban Flood Observations (UFO): A hand-labeled training and validation dataset of post-flood inundation

Urban flooding affects lives and infrastructure worldwide. Mapping inundation in complex urban environments from satellite imagery remains challenging due to limited spatial resolution, infrequent acquisitions, and cloud cover. We present Urban Flood Observations (UFO), a global, hand-labeled dataset of post-flood inundation in diverse urban settings. UFO comprises 215 image chips (1024 by 1024 pixels) from 14 flood events between 2017 and 2021, derived from 3 m PlanetScope imagery. Each chip is annotated with two classes: 'inundated' (all visible surface water, including floodwater and pre-existing water bodies (permanent or seasonal)) and 'non-inundated'. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we trained a segmentation model using leave-one-event-out cross-validation, achieving a mean Intersection over Union (IoU) of 77.3. We also used UFO to evaluate two widely used surface water products, the Sentinel-1-based NASA IMPACT model and Google's 10 m Dynamic World water class, which yielded IoUs of 44.1 and 48.1, respectively. UFO is publicly available to support the development and validation of urban inundation mapping methods.

BirdsEye-RU: A Dataset For Detecting Faces from Overhead Images

Detecting faces in overhead images remains a significant challenge due to extreme scale variations and environmental clutter. To address this, we created the BirdsEye-RU dataset, a comprehensive collection of 2,978 images containing over eight thousand annotated faces. This dataset is specifically designed to capture small and distant faces across diverse environments, containing both drone images and smartphone-captured images from high altitude. We present a detailed description of the BirdsEye-RU dataset in this paper. We made our dataset freely available to the public, and it can be accessed at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/mdahanafarifkhan/birdseye-ru.