  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 to pursue environmental justice. However, existing datasets are not of
sufficient quality nor quantity to train the robust CV models needed to support
air quality advocacy. We introduce RISE, the first large-scale video dataset
for Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions. We adopted a citizen science
approach to collaborate with local community members to annotate whether a
video clip has smoke emissions. Our dataset contains 12,567 clips from 19
distinct views from cameras that monitored three industrial facilities. These
daytime clips span 30 days over two years, including all four seasons. We ran
experiments using deep neural networks to establish a strong performance
baseline and reveal smoke recognition challenges. Our survey study discussed
community feedback, and our data analysis displayed opportunities for
integrating citizen scientists and crowd workers into the application of
Artificial Intelligence for Social Impact.
