HVAQ: A High-Resolution Vision-Based Air Quality Dataset

Air pollutants, such as particulate matter, strongly impact human health. Most existing pollution monitoring techniques use stationary sensors, which are typically sparsely deployed. However, real-world pollution distributions vary rapidly in space and the visual effects of air pollutant can be used to estimate concentration, potentially at high spatial resolution. Accurate pollution monitoring requires either densely deployed conventional point sensors, at-a-distance vision-based pollution monitoring, or a combination of both. This paper makes the following contributions: (1) we present a high temporal and spatial resolution air quality dataset consisting of PM2.5, PM10, temperature, and humidity data; (2) we simultaneously take images covering the locations of the particle counters; and (3) we evaluate several vision-based state-of-art PM concentration prediction algorithms on our dataset and demonstrate that prediction accuracy increases with sensor density and image. It is our intent and belief that this dataset can enable advances by other research teams working on air quality estimation.