ELDOR: A Large-Scale Drone Dataset and Benchmark for Monitoring Illegal Gold Mining in the Amazon Rainforest

ELDOR is a drone aerial dataset covering over 2500 hectares, designed specifically for monitoring illegal gold mining in the Amazon Rainforest. It provides pixel-level semantic annotations, supports four benchmark tasks, reveals the limitations of existing methods in identifying small-scale mining structures and fine-grained restoration categories, and fills a gap in the field of environmental remote sensing.

Illegal gold mining causes deforestation, water mercury pollution, and ecological damage in the Amazon Rainforest. Traditional satellite remote sensing has limitations such as insufficient resolution, cloud cover interference, and difficulty detecting subtle changes, making it hard to accurately monitor over 2000 illegal mining sites.

The ELDOR dataset covers a continuous area of over 2500 hectares, including high-resolution orthophotos. Pixel-level semantic segmentation annotations distinguish mining-affected areas from surrounding ecosystems, enabling analysis of the penetrating impact of mining on ecosystems.

Four tasks based on ELDOR: 1. Semantic segmentation (pixel classification); 2. Segmentation-derived recognition (high-level semantic concepts); 3. Direct multi-label classification (end-to-end scene recognition); 4. Vision-language category presence recognition (natural language feature detection).

Existing models have issues such as missed detection of small targets (small-scale mining structures), insufficient fine-grained classification (ecological restoration stages), and limited context understanding. There is a need to develop multi-modal models that integrate multi-source data (topography/hydrology/temporal sequence).

The research team developed an interactive platform that supports aerial data visualization navigation, model prediction comparison, expert annotation correction, and custom monitoring model prototype development, promoting the practical application of the dataset.

ELDOR provides a standardized benchmark for illegal mining monitoring. Its application directions include real-time monitoring systems, policy decision support, ecological impact assessment, and multi-modal model research, driving technological progress in Amazon Rainforest protection.