GVCCS : Ground Visible Camera Contrail Sequences

The GVCCS dataset provides the first open-access, instance-level annotated video dataset for contrail detection, segmentation, and tracking from Réuniwatt CamVision visible ground-based camera. Designed to support research into aviation’s non-CO₂ climate impacts, it contains 122 high-resolution video sequences (24,228 images) captured at EUROCONTROL’s Innovation Hub in Brétigny-sur-Orge, France.

Each sequence has been carefully labelled with instance-level multi polygon annotations, including temporally resolved contrail masks and consistent instance identifiers. A subset of contrails is also linked to unique flight identifiers (when attribution is possible) based on known aircraft trajectories.

The dataset is aimed at researchers in environmental science, aviation, remote sensing, and computer vision. It supports both semantic and panoptic segmentation tasks and is intended to foster development of models for:

• Contrail detection and instance segmentation
• Temporal tracking and lifecycle analysis
• Contrail-to-flight attribution and validation of physical models

Key Features:

• 24,228 annotated images across 122 video sequences (30sec frame rate) with a total of 176,194 individual polygons.
• 4651 instance-level multi-polygon contrails with temporal consistency (contrails are tracked across frames).
• 3354 contrails are associated to a flight with unique identifier.
• Image resolution: 1024×1024 (geometrically projected from fisheye camera) covering an area of 75km x 75km.

 Folder organisation : 

GVCCS/
├── azimuth_zenith_grid.npy
├── train/
│   ├── annotations.json
│   ├── parquet/
│   └── images/
├── test/
│   ├── annotations.json
│   ├── parquet/
│   └── images/


• azimuth_zenith_grid.npyis the grid of pixel to azitmuth zenith mapping

• Both train and test folders have a similar structure, with images, annotations, csv files.

• Images are high-resolution (1024×1024 pixels JPG files) stored in the images subfolders. Each projected image has been enhanced for visual clarity using brightness adjustment, local contrast amplification, and color rebalancing to improve contrail visibility (see paper description for more details).

• The parquetfolders include flight data for each sequence saved in parquet format. Each parquet file contains tabular data for the flight passing over the camera filtered with altitude higher than 15 000ft with the following columns: