DCSkyCam Full-Scene Wide-Angle Dataset

This dataset contains full-frame wide-angle images captured by the DCSkyCam — a Raspberry Pi-based webcam in Washington, DC. The images show the full camera field of view as captured by the HQ Camera module with a wide-angle lens.

Dataset Description

The DCSkyCam system used a three-stage detection pipeline:

1. Object Detection (SSD MobileNet V3) identifies candidate objects in the sky
2. Binary Classifier determines if a candidate is a helicopter or not
3. Multi-class Classifier identifies the specific helicopter type

This dataset contains the full-scene context shots captured by the webcam for stage 1.

Image Format

• Format: JPEG
• Resolutions: 3960×2382; Some images might be 1920×1080
• Total images: 4,556

Filename Convention

Class information is encoded in the filename prefix:

• Specific helicopter type (e.g., uh1n-*, as350-*, etc.)
• Unidentified / not-classified aircraft (i.e., unknown-*)
• Non-aircraft objects (i.e., not_helicopter*)

Class Distribution

helicopter: 4,477 not_helicopter: 79

heli_subtype	Count
UH1N	1,614
AS350	768
MH65	559
H60	373
B412	351
VH3D	135
S76	118
VH92	95
EC35	91
AW139	35
UH72	25
EC45	18
MD52	9
B206	3
AH6	2
B429	2
V22	1
Unknown	278

Usage Notes

• These images represent the full camera frame and may be useful for object detection and other tasks.
  • Note that the object detection was performed prior to lens geometry correction, and the images in this dataset are post-geometry correction. As a result, some aircraft from the helicopter-classification dataset might not be in the visible area of the images in this dataset.
• This dataset provides the full context for the cropped classification images in the helicopter-classification dataset. The hashes in the filenames can be used to map the full-scene image and the cropped object image.
• The dataset excludes images used for data augmentation during model training.

License

This dataset is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Citation

@misc{dcskycam_dataset,
  title = {DCSkyCam Full-Scene Wide-Angle Dataset},
  author = {DCSkyCam contributors},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/dcskycam/full-scene},
  license = {CC-BY-4.0}
}

Project Information

The DCSkyCam project was an AI-enabled sky monitoring system built on Raspberry Pi that automatically detected and identified helicopters using TensorFlow Lite models.