Detecting Vietnam War Bomb Craters in Declassified Historical KH-9
Satellite Imagery
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.