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Detecting Vietnam War Bomb Craters in Declassified Historical KH-9 Satellite Imagery
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  • Philipp Barthelme,
  • Eoghan Darbyshire,
  • Dominick Vincent Spracklen,
  • Gary R Watmough
Philipp Barthelme
University of Edinburgh

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Eoghan Darbyshire
The Conflict and Environment Observatory
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Dominick Vincent Spracklen
University of Leeds
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Gary R Watmough
University of Edinburgh
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Abstract

Thousands of people are injured every year from explosive remnants of war which include unexploded ordnance (UXO) and abandoned ordnance. UXO has negative long-term impacts on livelihoods and ecosystems in contaminated areas. Exact locations of remaining UXO are often unknown as survey and clearance activities can be dangerous, expensive and time-consuming. In Vietnam, Lao PDR and Cambodia, about 20% of the land remains contaminated by UXO from the Vietnam War. Recently declassified historical KH-9 satellite imagery, taken during and immediately after the Vietnam War, now provides an opportunity to map this remaining contamination. KH-9 imagery was acquired and orthorectified for two study areas in Southeast Asia. Bomb craters were manually labeled in a subset of the imagery to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for automated crater detection. The CNNs achieved a F1-Score of 0.61 and identified more than 500,000 bomb craters across the two study areas. The detected craters provided more precise information on the impact locations of bombs than target locations available from declassified U.S. bombing records. This could allow for a more precise localization of suspected hazardous areas during non-technical surveys as well as a more fine-grained determination of residual risk of UXO. The method is directly transferable to other areas in Southeast Asia and is cost-effective due to the low cost of the KH-9 imagery and the use of open-source software. The results also show the potential of integrating crater detection into data-driven decision making in mine action across more recent conflicts.
04 Mar 2024Submitted to ESS Open Archive
04 Mar 2024Published in ESS Open Archive